Class 




5\ C \Q\ 



Book h 

Copyright^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



IN PREPARATION 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

DOES PRAYER AVAIL ? 
WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 



The present volume will soon 
be followed by two others 
bearing the above titles, both 
closely conjoined with the first 
in certain essential elements and 
in mode of treatment, and the 
three constituting together a 
discussion along new lines of a 
single unified three-fold theme 



SHERMAN, FRENCH # COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS BOSTON 



MAN'S TOMORROW 



BY 



... 



WILLIAM W^KINSLEY 

II 

Author of " Views on Vexed Questions," 
"Old Faiths and New Facts," etc. 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1911 






Copyright, 19 11 
Sherman, French & Company 



CCU280957 



PREFACE 

A decade and a half ago I published under an- 
other title the results of my research and reflection 
on this great question which has alike allured and 
eluded for almost a score of centuries, the most 
eager inquirers throughout the Christian world. 

With increased leisure and facilities for investi- 
gation, I have secured so much important, attrac- 
tive, and new material I have concluded to re-write 
my views and bring them down to date, for while 
life lasts this theme so far-reaching, and of such 
universal, personal interest cannot fail to arrest 
attention, and while scientists in recent times are 
so tireless and so successful in their search into 
the secrets of nature our conclusions should fre- 
quently pass in review and undergo careful revis- 
ion in consonance with this continual inflooding 
of new light. 

The fearless spirit of inquiry abroad to-day has 
unearthed a vast multitude of facts in every de- 
partment, and also many interlacing systems of 
law. Thinkers in their attempted solution of this 
problem encounter novel and most formidable dif- 
ficulties and also unexpected and valuable helps. 
The modes of solution that satisfied former centu- 
ries prove wholly inadequate to meet the demands 
of these modern times. There is not now that 
overmastering awe and reverence that once quite 
effectually barred out investigation. There is no 



PREFACE 

longer that childlike, unquestioning acceptance of 
the dictum of others, however learned or holy, or 
hedged about with ecclesiastical prestige and 
power. The Sacred Scriptures themselves have 
not escaped the searching criticisms that every- 
where prevail, even in the schools of the prophets. 

There are still, it is true, great numbers who 
are so intently busy with affairs, or so averse to, 
or untrained in consecutive thinking, or are so 
purblind through superstitions that are born of 
ignorance, that they feel no incitement to inde- 
pendent inquiries on this theme, resting content 
either with no opinion, or with simply an adopted 
one, accepting whatever conclusions they are told 
are Biblical or orthodox. This mass of minds, not 
yet having felt the stir of modern thought, or been 
disturbed by modern doubt, naturally feel little 
interest in the re-settlement of this question, al- 
though it is fraught with such momentous issues. 

There is, however, a public, rapidly enlarging, 
made up of vigorous, progressive inquirers, eager 
after truth, and willing to follow it wherever it 
may lead, to which the old proofs appear wholly 
inadequate, and consequently the old beliefs to be 
shrouded in the gravest doubt. It is not enough 
for them to be shown merely what the Scriptures 
teach and the canons of the Church authoritatively 
affirm. They call for facts, facts incontrovertibly 
established with scientific accuracy, with cool judi- 
cial precision, in the various departments of 
physics and metaphysics, biology and psychology, 



PREFACE 

history and biography, of the many different 
branches of modern research. They call for an 
orderly, logical grouping and interpretation of 
those facts and a clear demonstration of the un- 
derlying principles and laws that witness to the 
active presence of an organizing, over-ruling 
mind. It is to such inquirers that the following 
pages are addressed, and it is therefore from their 
standpoint that I am to carry on the present dis- 
cussion. 

In re-settling for my own personal needs this 
question, I have had to re-examine the lowest 
foundations of all theistic faith, to determine in 
my own mind whether there is an actual personal- 
ity behind all phenomena from which they either 
directly or indirectly proceed, whether the uni- 
verse evinces strict unity of design and witnesses 
to the thought-life of not only an ever-living but 
an ever-active Designer, or whether matter, hav- 
ing neither beginning nor end, does not really 
contain within itself "the promise and potency of 
all life." As I have attempted to settle this, the 
most fundamental of all beliefs, in my volume en- 
titled "Views on Vexed Questions," in the divisions 
entitled "The Supernatural" and "Mental Life 
below the Human," I will in the present discussion 
assume as settled the truth of theism and will pro- 
ceed on that basis. 

If in my attempt to solve the present problem 
I have reached conclusions controverting those en- 
tertained by any of my readers, all I ask is that, 



PREFACE 

holding in abeyance preconceived opinions as I 
have endeavored to do in my own case, they in- 
quire simply whether the facts cited have been sat- 
isfactorily established, and whether the conclu- 
sions based upon them have been logically reached. 
The present presentation of this theme has been 
prepared in the hope that some of the many dis- 
heartened ones in the great company of anxious 
and earnest inquirers may thereby escape ship- 
wreck as they attempt, as I have done, to thread 
their way through the narrows and amid the hid- 
den rocks of doubt and unbelief, and at last be 
enabled to sail out into the open sea of a reassured 
faith in an endless life prophesied and provided 
for by a distinctively personal, infinitely loving 

W. W. K. 

Washington, D. C. 



MAN'S TOMORROW 



MAN'S TOMORROW 



No lips so mute as the lips of the dead. No 
curtain of so close a texture as that which hides 
from the life that now is the life which is to come. 
We sit by the deathbeds of our loved ones and 
think we catch glimpses of the spirit-world as 
their souls pass within the shadow. Sometimes 
when they seem sinking into the dreamless sleep 
there comes suddenly into their eyes a far-away 
look, a rapturous glow, and we listen with bated 
breath while they try to tell us of visions of mar- 
velous splendor; but the light fades away and 
the voice is stilled forever, and as we brood in our 
desolation, we wonder whether, after all, the vision 
is not simply some bright figment of the fancy. 
We dare not, can not, rest our faith upon it. And 
so too, afterward, when, as often happens, a 
strangely peaceful, an almost youthful look comes 
back into the face of the dead, we try to persuade 
ourselves that here at last we surely see some- 
thing more than a sunset's afterglow, that here 
are glintings of light from the other world shot 
through for an instant as the curtain is lifted to 
let the soul pass in; but sober second thought re- 
fuses even this consolation to abide with us longer 
than through the first lonely hours of our be- 
reavement. 

We go to the Sacred Records of our religion 

1 



2 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and in answer to our longing there comes the 
voice, "Beloved, it does not yet appear what we 
shall be." We are assured, however, that the life 
beyond is made up of two widely contrasted spir- 
itual states, but these are so poetically pictured, 
the descriptions are so ablaze with the richest pro- 
fusion of Oriental imagery, that we are often left 
quite free to follow our own imaginings. As a 
consequence of the granting of such wide latitude 
of belief we, in our eager search for the secret hid- 
den away so deeply in the eternal silence, have 
been widely misled, as is evidenced by the differ- 
ences in the interpretations we have given to the 
vague and meager revelations of the Record, our 
judgments being warped by our individual tem- 
peraments, our early training, our tastes and apti- 
tudes, our hopes and fears. 

Heaven, as generally conceived by the Chris- 
tian world, is some resplendent city in a golden 
by and by, lying just over the border line of death, 
an Elysium into which the ransomed soul is in- 
stantly ushered the moment it makes its exit from 
this perishing and pain-racked body of clay. It 
is the supposed embodiment, the perfect fruition 
of all that aching, hungering human hearts have 
here most sorely missed and intensely longed for. 
To the footsore and care-burdened it is fondly 
looked forward to as an unbroken, joyous rest, 
a sweet Beulah Land; to the starving, shivering 
poor, as an ever-blooming and ever-fruiting Para- 
dise of Delights ; to the disabled, the sick, and the 



MAN'S TOMORROW 3 

ill-shaped, to the bereaved, the neglected, and the 
lonely, as the place where all ills are ended, where 
long-lost loved ones meet again in never-ending 
union, where there is generous appreciation and 
blessed companionship and love without alloy. 

At the magic touch of death, in the twinkling 
of an eye, the most marvelous change is supposed 
to be wrought, the soul stepping at once from a 
life measured by a span and marked by swift vi- 
cissitude, by broken hopes and painful partings, 
by desperate battlings and tumultuous storms of 
passion, into one of eternal duration, of unbroken 
calm, and of fixed fate. 

Hell looms up as a place of blackest shadow, 
where lost souls wander ceaselessly, abandoned of 
hope and of love, driven hither and thither by 
wild gusts of passion and gnawed by sharp pangs 
of remorse as they revolve over and over again 
in their awful nightmare of wretched, rayless 
thought the misspent privileges of an irrevocable 
past. 

Many, however, refusing to accept this creed 
of the masses, have formulated others more in con- 
sonance, as they think, with reason and the Re- 
vealed Word, while many others still, becoming 
bewildered in their search, have either lapsed into 
agnosticism or settled down into indifference or 
blank materialistic unbelief. 

The scientific researches and discoveries of to- 
day, while they have in their first influences 
tended to unsettle the old faiths and to lead mul- 



4 MAN'S TOMORROW 

titudes of earnest seekers to seriously question 
whether this life does not really end all, are begin- 
ning to give promising token of clarifying and set- 
tling opinions as to whether there is a life beyond 
and what that life will be; and while inducing 
scholars to search for new meanings in the dim 
foreshadowings of Scripture, are bringing to 
light a wondrous and hitherto unthought-of har- 
mony between the intimations of science and the 
partial disclosures of that Holy Writ on whose 
divine inspiration reverent millions still cofidently 
and lovingly rest their faith. 

This is no idle and fruitless speculation, for our 
present life is essentially colored and shaped by 
our conceptions of that which is to come. 

If science can be shown to be, as far as it goes, 
corroborative of Scripture and to throw strong 
side-lights upon its pages, and if more just views 
can be made to prevail as to what the Bible actu- 
ally teaches, thousands will be rescued from a 
most alarming paralysis of doubt and disbelief. 

In the present discussion I desire to include 
under the appellation of science not only what 
are generally designated the exact sciences, but 
also the science of history, of metaphysics, of 
biology, and of psychology. 

In the first place, what aids have investigations 
of science furnished for determining whether there 
is any life beyond? We may concede that it has 
thus far obtained no positive knowledge on this 
point, for it has kept itself busy discovering, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 5 

classifying, and interpreting the phenomena of 
the life that now is. It is true it has quite re- 
cently entered upon a serious and systematic study 
of apparitions. In 1882 a Society for Psychical 
Research was founded in England with an import- 
ant branch in our own country. Prof. Henry 
Sidgwick, of Cambridge University, England, 
was at its head. His successors have been scien- 
tists of international fame. Among its vice- 
presidents have been the Right Hon. Arthur J. 
Balfour, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Bishop of 
Ripon, Prof. James, of Harvard University, Prof. 
Langley, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Sir 
Oliver Lodge, F.R.S. On its roll of members are 
the names of Gladstone, Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, 
Frederick W. H. Myers, Prof. J. C. Adams, F.R. 
S., Alfred Russel Wallace. Twenty-one or more 
volumes of reports have already been issued by 
it. In one of them it deliberately makes the an- 
nouncement that "the society has at last succeeded 
in establishing beyond all gainsaying, first, the 
fact of apparitions, and secondly, that they are 
as often those of persons living at a distance from 
the place where they are observed as of those who 
have died." But this, instead of finally dispos- 
ing of the old query, starts new ones. What are 
those apparitions? Are they real entities? Have 
the souls of the living been able in some mysteri- 
ous way to leave their bodies for a time, cross 
continents and seas with the swiftness of light, 
take on and lay off at will new bodies, featured 



6 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and contoured like the old ones, and startle their 
friends as they thrust themselves into their pres- 
ence in open, wakeful vision? Or have they be- 
come possessed with some strange power of plac- 
ing themselves in close mental union with those to 
whom they seem to appear, and thus momentarily 
so to monopolize their imagination that their very 
forms seem to stand revealed like living person- 
ages, their eyes to glisten, their cheeks to flush, 
their lips to move, and even their voices to utter 
familiar thoughts in the same old familiar tones? 
Have the souls of the dead re-clothed themselves 
and entered once more the haunts of the living? 
Or are these apparitions some spiritual mirage, 
some seeming materialization of the concepts of 
unconscious cerebration? That the creations of 
the fancy have been apparently projected into 
space and assumed the form of actual, living per- 
sonages is shown by the well-known experiences 
of William Blake, that mystic poet, engraver, and 
painter, born in London in the middle of the 
eighteenth century. He was haunted with visions 
all his life. It is said of him that, when only a 
boy, sauntering along one day he saw a tree filled 
with angels, bright wings bespangling every 
bough like stars. He told of it when he reached 
home, and his father threatened to thrash him 
for lying, but his more gentle mother, prompted 
by her sympathy, saved him through her inter- 
cessions. Multitudes of his pictures were careful 
copies of the faces and forms that he said he saw 



MAN'S TOMORROW 7 

all about him. He would draw with the utmost alac- 
rity and composure, looking up from time to time 
as though he had a real sitter before him. Some- 
times he would have to wait for the vision, then 
again it would promptly answer to his call. At 
others, in the midst of his sketching, he would 
suddenly leave off and remark, "I can not go on, 
it is gone, the, mouth has moved," or, "He frowns, 
he is displeased with my picture." The devil him- 
self would politely sit in a chair to this strange 
man and then vanish instantly and without warn- 
ing. When his work was criticised he would 
calmly reply, "It must be right, I saw it so," and 
this without any appearance of conceit on his 
part. These visionary heads were called by Var- 
ley, a warm personal friend and admirer, "Blake's 
specters." They had the characteristics of literal 
portraitures of what Blake saw. 

Emanuel Swedenborg is another case in point, 
being a man of like constitutional temperament 
and gifts ; and similar experiences are also related 
of that most ethereally gifted Shelley, whose im- 
agination Peter Bayne, the Scotch critic, has 
pronounced "the princeliest that ever sublimed 
enthusiasm or personated thought." Martin Lu- 
ther, history tells us, once hurled his inkstand at 
the Imp of Darkness because, as he thought, he 
had too persistently intruded upon the privacy 
of his study chamber. 

The recorded evidences of the various appari- 
tions of Christ after his crucifixion are well wor- 



8 MAN'S TOMORROW 

thy of the dispassionate study of scientists, and 
as eminent investigators have at last thought it 
worth their while to enter methodically upon the 
examination of this whole group of psychic phe- 
nomena, embracing wakeful vision, mesmeric 
trance, and mental telegraphy, too largely aban- 
doned to superstitious fear and reverent relig- 
ious faith, and as this society to which I have re- 
ferred has already announced as established be- 
yond gainsay that apparitions of both the living 
and the dead have actually taken place, I have 
no doubt that Christ's recorded appearances will 
receive careful and candid attention. It is con- 
fidently claimed, and certainly with fair show of 
reason, that no accredited fact of history has 
been more strongly fortified by testimony and cir- 
cumstantial evidence. The science of historical 
research ought most thoroughly to test the suffi- 
ciency of the proofs and authoritatively announce 
whether it has discovered any fatal flaw. The 
candor of the witnesses it would seem must stand 
unimpeached. These reappearances were wholly 
unanticipated by Christ's disciples. Overcome by 
their fears, they had abandoned him in his last 
extremity. After he was taken down from the 
cross they had no question but that he was dead. 
All hope was lost. The devout women who went 
first to his tomb carried spices to embalm his 
corpse. The prepossession, the "fixed idea" neces- 
sary to hallucination, is noticeably absent in the 
case of all these witnesses. What worldly incen- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 9 

tive could his friends have had to fraudulently 
proclaim him risen? The Roman soldiers took 
special pains to make sure that he was dead, and 
the results of the spear-thrust so thoroughly con- 
vinced them of it that they concluded not to break 
his legs. The Roman Government with extraor- 
dinary precaution sealed his tomb and set a 
watch. How account for the fact that his dis- 
ciples, every one of them without an exception, 
after they had disgraced themselves by cowardly 
flight, reappeared, boldly and stoutly contending 
that Christ had risen, and persisting in this open 
proclamation notwithstanding such public avowal 
jeopardized their every worldly prospect and en- 
dangered their lives? Why did they make this 
the central thought in all their public discourses, 
and endure contumely, poverty, stripes, and im- 
prisonment for this their professed belief, and 
persist in their intrepid advocacy until, with but 
a single exception, they met with a violent death? 
The apparitions, it is asserted, were many, 
were made under widely different circumstances, 
and in some instances before a large concourse 
of witnesses in broad daylight. On one occasion 
Christ is said to have actually eaten fish and honey 
with some of his disciples, and to have told them 
to handle him so as to be thoroughly satisfied that 
he was not a wraith. Even doubting Thomas be- 
came convinced after he had been permitted to 
thrust his fingers into the print of the nails. How 
account for the substitution of the Christian Sun- 



10 MAN'S TOMORROW 

day for the Jewish Sabbath except on the ground 
of a prevalent belief in the verity of Christ's res- 
urrection, which if true must take rank as pre- 
eminently the most significant fact in all the past? 
De Wette, a leading German rationalist, who with 
Vater did more than any other, so Strauss him- 
self acknowledges, to establish the mythical ex- 
planation of the Bible narrative, freely confessed 
that the historical evidence of Christ's resurrec- 
tion was absolutely incontrovertible, although the 
manner of it was still a mystery. This testimony 
is entitled to great weight, and may well set sci- 
entists thinking, for it was given after long and 
painstaking research begun with the confident ex- 
pectation of finding the account fallacious, and 
in the face of the skepticism he had himself 
helped to create. 

No candid mind can question for an instant that 
Saul of Tarsus firmly believed that he saw Christ 
while on the road to Damascus. He apparently 
had no self-interest to conserve by affirming the 
apparition, but every self-interest to sacrifice. 
He was at the time a young man of bright parts 
and brilliant prospects, a favorite pupil of Gama- 
liel, a most enthusiastic and bigoted leader among 
the persecutors of the Christians — one whose am- 
bition knew no bounds, whose heart knew no fear, 
whose brain knew no fatigue. This vision was 
not the vivid imagining of one tortured by an up- 
braiding conscience, for, as he afterwards ex- 
pressed it, he verily thought he was doing God's 



MAN'S TOMORROW 11 

service. There is therefore, as far as we can see, 
no assignable cause for his insistence that he saw 
Christ, except the fact itself of such a vision. This 
belief he steadfastly maintained, though it sub- 
jected him to lifelong persecution and privation, 
exposed him to imminent perils, cost him his lib- 
erty, and at last his life. The narrator naively 
adds that the rest of the company heard a voice, 
but saw no man. While this moderation of state- 
ment wins our faith in the truth of the tale, it 
naturally raises the query whether there appeared 
and spoke the veritable Christ, or whether the ex- 
citable and highly imaginative Saul unwittingly 
misinterpreted the effects on himself of some elec- 
trical discharge from the clouds. But, on second 
thought, we see how extremely improbable it is 
that he should have remained thus deluded 
through those three succeeding years of retire- 
ment and quiet thought and the long after-life of 
severe trial. Besides, the theory that it was a de- 
lusion fails to explain Paul's vision two or three 
days after of one named Ananias coming to re- 
store his sight, the specific direction by Christ's 
apparition to this same Ananias to visit Saul in 
a certain place, and the correctness of the informa- 
tion it then conveyed. The corresponding events 
which immediately followed and the fact that simi- 
lar visions were claimed by many with whom Saul 
daily conversed and in whom he afterward learned 
implicitly to confide, confirmed him in his belief. 
If Christ had power to open Saul's eyes he cer- 



12 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tainly had equal power to shut the eyes of those 
who journeyed with him. During his forty days* 
tarrying after his crucifixion it is affirmed that 
Christ became visible and invisible at will. These 
strange occurrences are well worth the careful con- 
sideration of scientists. Few facts have been more 
thoroughly authenticated. Few have more con- 
vincing force or are fraught with more momen- 
tous issues. 

While it is the province of the science of history 
to sift the evidence upon which belief in these ap- 
paritions of Christ is based, it is that of psycho- 
logy to account for their origin, explain their 
nature, and assign them their true place among 
the accredited phenomena of this mystery- 
shrouded something which we call life. 

As this most inviting field of inquiry is now 
being examined more systematically than ever be- 
fore by scientific explorers of world-wide repute, 
we may confidently look for some authoritative 
statement on the subject at no very distant day, 
and it may be that science will finally establish as 
a demonstrated fact that there is a life beyond 
and that Christ's resurrection with its blessed 
promise and prophecy must be classed among the 
accredited facts of history. 

There are certain phenomena of somnambulism, 
clairvoyance and clairaudience, hypnotic trance, 
and telepathy which science has accepted as es- 
tablished facts, but of which it has not as yet been 
able to make any satisfactory explanation, rest- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 13 

ing content, with here and there a notable excep- 
tion, to pronounce them results of abnormal ner- 
vous conditions. 

Somnambulists have been known, while wrapped 
in profound sleep, with eyes shut or insensible, to 
walk with firm, quick tread and with marvelous 
precision along the edge of precipices, to climb 
the rough, rocky sides of cliffs and take eaglets 
from their nests, to cross narrow bridges and the 
steep roofs of houses, to make long and danger- 
ous journeys afoot and on horseback and return 
to their couches again, utterly unconscious at day- 
break that they had ever left them. How is it 
they thread their way with such certainty among 
the thousand pitfalls that beset them everywhere? 
There is no appearance of blind groping. They 
act as if they saw clearly and quickly and had 
their wits about them. How do they see? How 
tread so safely, keep their poise, avoid obstruc- 
tions? How adapt themselves to ever-changing 
circumstances? Artisans have been known while 
in this state to be as expert and exact in their dif- 
ficult work as when awake and with eyes wide open. 
Sermons, musical compositions, and poems have 
thus for the first time been written out and care- 
fully corrected, and long and intricate problems in 
higher mathematics solved and transferred to 
paper, involving many a tedious process. Some 
affirm that Coleridge attributed his "Christabel," 
whose exquisite music so charmed Scott and By- 
ron, to a vision. It has, as you remember, a very 



14 MAN'S TOMORROW 

abrupt closing. He was never able to extend and 
complete it as begun, as it seemed above, or at 
least foreign to, his ordinary conceptual and 
rythmical power. It may have been the product 
of simply a preternatural awakening of Cole- 
ridge's intellectual powers, or, possibly, the un- 
conscious output of what T. J. Hudson, in a work 
entitled "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," de- 
nominates the subjective self. I have failed to find 
in Coleridge's published works any mention of this 
alleged vision-origin, but as to that far-famed 
fragment, Kubla Khan, written about the same 
time, we know that it sprang into life and actu- 
ally assumed its present literary form while this 
exceptionally gifted seer lay in the arms of that 
enchantress, opium, under whose fatal spell he 
finally fell. In a preface to this poem it is 
said that "in consequence of a slight indisposition 
an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects 
of which Coleridge fell asleep in his chair at the 
moment he was reading from Purchas' Pilgrim- 
age: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a pal- 
ace to be built and a stately garden thereunto, and 
thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with 
a wall." The author continued for about three 
hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external 
senses, during which time he had the most vivid 
consciousness that he composed not less than from 
two to three hundred lines, if that can indeed be 
called composition in which all the images rose 
up before him as things with a parallel produc- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 15 

tion of the correspondent expressions, without any 
sensation of effort. On awaking, he appeared to 
himself to have a distinct recollection of the 
whole, and, taking pen, ink, and paper, instantly 
and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here 
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately 
called out by a person on business and detained 
an hour, and on his return found, to his no small 
surprise and mortification, that though he still re- 
tained some vague and dim recollection of the 
vision, the lines and images had passed away for- 
ever. He frequently purposed to finish for him- 
self what had been originally, as it were, given to 
him — but the tomorrow never came. 

Raphael painted visions which he thought were 
presented to him by the spirit of his mother. The 
poem, "A Rose Leaf," by the late Mrs. Helen 
Hunt Jackson, was, as she related to a friend, 
composed in her sleep, she awaking with the words 
on her lips. She immediately wrote out the verses 
and handed them to her physician, saying: "Can 
you tell me what this means? I am sure I don't 
know." This occurred but a few weeks before 
her death. 

We have been wont to pronounce all these to 
be but specimens of dream-literature and art, not 
of converse with the dead, yet, granting this, is 
there is not a mystery about them still, as well as 
about the unwonted powers of sense displayed in 
sleep to which I have referred? Do they not fur- 
nish strong presumptive evidence that there are 



16 MAN'S TOMORROW 

moods of the soul in which the resources of this 
tangible body of ours are not called into service, 
when the ordinary organs of sense are not needed 
for sense-perception, when thought processes are 
carried on without the use of the convoluted gray 
matter of the brain, when this cumbersome clay 
organism, failing to satisfy our needs, is tempo- 
rarily laid aside and a second, subtler servant 
does the bidding of the master? 

There are seemingly wakeful moods that are 
wrapped in as profound a mystery. Lady Henry 
Somerset, when at the opening of her great 
career of reformer and philanthropist, became 
greatly depressed with doubt, questioning even the 
being of a God. But as she sat alone one sum- 
mer afternoon in her garden at the foot of an elm, 
deeply absorbed in thought, she heard a voice 
saying to her with startling distinctness, "Act as 
if I were and thou shalt know I am." From that 
moment her painful questionings ceased, the rest- 
ful calm of a childlike faith pervaded and trans- 
formed her whole after-life, and she became a con- 
secrated leader of reform, worthily taking up the 
work which the great Lord Shaftesbury had laid 
down. Luther, while at Rome, heard a voice as 
he was climbing painfully on his knees up the 
steps of the so-called Judgment Seat of Pilate, 
and its influence never left him. It changed all 
the course of his after-life. It became one of the 
great determining forces that shook all Europe 
to its center in the Reformation of the sixteenth 



MAN'S TOMORROW 17 

century. Jeanne D'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, that 
simple, uneducated, inexperienced peasant girl of 
eighteen years of age, who at the opening of the 
fifteenth century led the forces of France to fre- 
quent victory over the disciplined veterans of Eng- 
land, proving herself more than a match for the 
trained strategists of the most warlike nation then 
on the globe — this maid insisted upon it that she 
was acting under the express direction of invisible 
guides, that she heard distinct voices time and 
again that told her how to dispose of her forces, 
manoeuvre her artillery, and make and manage 
her onsets. She also claimed to have visions and 
to be prompted to prophecy, and her foretellings, 
improbable as many of them seemed when she ut- 
tered them, came true with rarely an exception. 
How will we explain her unerring insight into the 
deep problems that arise in the conduct of a great 
campaign, in the frequent and fearful emergen- 
cies of a raging battle? Would the pronouncing 
her a great military genius solve the mystery of 
her career? Whence that profound knowledge 
of the arts of war? The age was indeed super- 
stitious, and religious fears and fervors were rife, 
but will these account for her victories? How- 
ever great the enthusiasm with which she, mounted 
on her charger and waving aloft her white stand- 
ard, led her hosts against the enemy, it offers no 
adequate explanation of the results. For almost 
five hundred years her career has filled the world 
with wonder. Was she one of those Heaven-sent 



18 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and Heaven-taught leaders and rescuers that have 
now and then flashed out on the centuries of hu- 
man history? Was she in touch with wiser intel- 
ligence than her own? Or was she privileged to 
call into activity some latent energies of the soul? 

We are informed that a committee of the ablest 
scientists of the Royal Academy of Medicine of 
France, after an investigation extending over a 
period of six years, reported that it had demon- 
strated the existence of such powers in the human 
mind known as clairvoyance and thought-transfer- 
ence or mind-reading. Clairvoyants, it is said, 
have been able in their trances to read the pages 
of closed books, look through various opaque ob- 
jects, and observe minutely what is happening in 
closed apartments miles away. 

By the hidden help of mesmerism or hypnotism, 
as it is now called — although, as has recently been 
shown, the one is by no means identical with the 
other — one mind has been known to capture and 
control the concepts of another, overpower the 
will, conjure up phantasms of the fancy, and even 
for a time submerge in the subject self -conscious- 
ness itself while not an articulate word passes and 
the minds en rapport are separated by quite con- 
siderable distances and the one upon whom this 
strange influence is exerted is not thinking of his 
captor or acquainted with his whereabouts, or 
even aware whence that irresistible force origin- 
ates that binds him as with bands of steel, fills his 
mind with wild alarms, or exalts it into ecstasies 
not its own. 



MAN'S TOMORROW 19 

The dominance of ideas that comes through "ex- 
pectant attention" may explain, as works on 
psychology affirm, some of the manifestations of 
animal magnetism and kindred states, but there is 
a large residuum of facts this theory is wholly in- 
adequate to account for. Recent experiments by 
members of the Society for Psychical Research 
have demonstrated that an actual effluence 
emanates from the mesmerist and is subject to 
his will, while hypnotic power comes through sug- 
gestion solely, according to Prof. Leibault, par- 
taking of the nature of a mental dominance. 

It has been found so difficult to sift out from 
the alleged phenomena of so-called spirit mani- 
festations the elements of fraud, superstition, and 
self -deceiving reflex nervous and mental action, 
that most scientists have until recently despaired 
of arriving at any satisfactory results in their 
quest. But even into these dim, mysterious re- 
gions of shadow the trained observers constitut- 
ing the active members of this Society for 
Psychical Research, have resolutely entered, and 
their passionless, methodic scrutiny may, as here 
and there a scientific explorer has done before 
them, uncover facts which will astonish us. These 
hidden spirits of ours may be found possessed with 
capacities as yet largely latent which will suggest 
and go far to prove that they have a life indepen- 
dent of the gross clay organisms that at present 
house them, that they have under their control 
other bodies more perfectly equipped with sense 



20 MAN'S TOMORROW 

organs and organs of thought, and of a texture 
originally so ethereal, or else so etherealized by a 
more perfect vitalization, that the disintegrating 
chemical forces can be kept permanently in check. 

Prof. F. W. Barrett, in a paper read before 
this society, announced that through various ex- 
periments with private mediums it had been con- 
clusively established that heavy tables were actu- 
ally moved without any hand touching them, show- 
ing that mind occasionally and unconsciously can 
exert direct influence upon matter outside the 
body, and this professor is vouched for by such 
men as Balfour Stewart and Richard A. Proctor 
as not only of high scientific attainments but of 
pronounced caution in investigation. 

J. W. Edmonds, at one time President of the 
New York State Senate and judge in the New 
York Supreme Court of Appeals, a man widely 
known for his learning, his acumen, and his can- 
dor, testifies that in 1851 he was one of a party 
of nine who witnessed a heavy mahogany table sus- 
pended in the air, with no one near it, in a room 
brightly lighted by two lamps. This is only one 
out of many unaccountable phenomena which came 
under his personal observation. Startling facts 
in telepathy he also recounts. When he began 
his investigations he fully intended to make public 
exposure of what he suspected were gross decep- 
tions, but his prejudices were all swept aside by 
the overwhelming evidence that came to him 
through his own senses. He took notes every 



MAN'S TOMORROW 21 

night of what he had seen and heard as carefully 
as if in court, and afterward published them in 
two volumes on the subject. 

Dr. Robert Hare, a distinguished professor of 
chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, one 
of the foremost scientific men of America, the dis- 
coverer of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe which led to 
the celebrated Drummond light, and an extensive 
author of scientific treatises and inventor of scien- 
tific instruments, published a volume entitled 
"Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated," which 
passed through five editions, giving results of his 
most careful experimental research for two years 
into these manifestations by means of appliances 
of very ingenious contriving, and in this he gives 
instance after instance of heavy bodies being 
moved about without visible touch, as well as many 
others equally astounding. He had till now been 
a pronounced materialist, disbelieving alike in 
God, immortality, and revelation, but during 
these investigations he became so deeply convinced 
that the phenomena were caused by spirit agency 
that he dismissed all his former skepticism and 
became a devout disciple of the Christ of the 
Bible. However widely our interpretations of the 
facts may differ from his, none of us will ques- 
tion his capacity or his candor. 

Dr. J. Lockhart Robertson, long one of the 
editors of the "Journal of Mental Science," a spe- 
cialist in mental diseases, a man seemingly 
thoroughly equipped against delusion, having the 



22 MAN'S TOMORROW 

experience and cool caution of a scientist, pub- 
lished in the report of the London Dialectical 
Society, corroborating his own testimony by that 
of another eyewitness, that he himself saw a strong 
table broken in pieces by some invisible power 
while he was firmly holding the medium's hands, 
that this was done at his own suggestion as a test 
in his own house; also that he had heard most 
wonderful music produced without any agency he 
could discover, and that he had seen a shadow 
hand, not that of any one present, lift a pencil 
and write with it. He afterwards reiterated these 
statements, while at the same time expressing his 
disbelief in their spirit origin. 

The Dialectical Society referred to was organ- 
ized in 1869 for the express purpose of investi- 
gating psychical phenomena, and was composed 
of forty members, all of liberal education, being 
lawyers, scientists, and clergymen. It met at 
private residences, in well-lighted rooms, and had 
no professional or paid mediums. Four-fifths of 
the members were wholly skeptical of the reality 
of the alleged phenomena. These investigators 
applied every possible test they could devise to 
guard against delusion or mistake. Their pub- 
lished reports show that heavy bodies were moved 
and sounds disclosing intelligence were produced 
without material contact, demonstrating that there 
is a force which, although in some unknown man- 
ner dependent on the presence of human beings, 
is not dependent on any muscular exertion. The 



MAN'S TOMORROW 23 

society acknowledged that it obtained absolutely 
no evidence as to the nature or source of this 
strange energy, but simply proved the fact of its 
existence. 

Sir David Brewster, Lord Brougham, Lord 
Lindsay, F. R. S. ; Prof. Wells, of Harvard ; Prof . 
Hare, of Philadelphia; William Crookes, F. R. 
S., all versed in science, together with William 
Cullen Bryant, Judge Edmonds, Lord Bulwer- 
Lytton, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T. A. 
Trollope, and scores of others, testify to a per- 
sonal witnessing of extraordinary phenomena tak- 
ing place through the celebrated medium D. D. 
Home, such as holding quietly in the naked, open 
palm red-hot coals without any apparent effect 
from the heat, the playing on musical instruments 
without any visible fingers touching the keys, and 
on many occasions the suspension of his body in 
mid-air. One of the above witnesses, Prof. Wil- 
liam Crookes, F. R. S., discoverer of the metal 
thallium, a trained and experienced physicist, in- 
stituted a series of experiments, lasting several 
years, putting Home's powers to the most severe 
scientific test, and published an account of them 
in the London Quarterly Journal of Science in 
1871 to 1874, declaring them to be all that had 
been claimed. 

Home's seances were frequented by many of 
the leaders in literary, scientific, and social cir- 
cles in all the civilized countries of both hemis- 
pheres, and he was an invited guest in the royal 



24 MAN'S TOMORROW 

palaces of France, Prussia, Holland, and Russia. 
Among the converts were Mrs. Browning, Dr. 
Robert Chalmers, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, of the 
Journal of Mental Science, and the eminent phy- 
siologist John Elliotson. While Home and his 
followers ascribed his peculiar powers to spirit 
influence, the world outside have until recently 
rested content simply to call it a mystery — an ex- 
hibit of some occult force in Nature or in him- 
self. 

A. R. Wallace enumerates such phenomena, 
taking place through Home, as percussive 
sounds, alterations in the weight of bodies, the 
suspension of human bodies in mid-air, luminous 
appearances, as of detached hands lifting small 
objects or writing, pencils writing without any 
one touching them, also phantom forms and 
faces. These strange occurrences took place 
during experiments conducted mostly in Wil- 
liam Crookes' own house and in the light. 
Wallace himself, whose repute is world-wide 
as an equal sharer with Darwin in the honor 
of originating the theory of development, be- 
came an eyewitness, while investigating spiritism 
as a careful scientist, of phenomena equally as 
startling as any referred to, and as inexplicable 
if souls are held as close prisoners or are pos- 
sessed of only such powers as we are accustomed 
to think. 

Rev. Joseph Cook, in a public lecture in the 
Old South Church, Boston, March 15, 1880, gave 



MAN'S TOMORROW 25 

a full account of what he personally witnessed at 
the private residence of Epes Sargent two even- 
ings before. There were nine in the party, a major- 
ity of whom were strongly prejudiced against 
spiritism. Notes of the facts were at once care- 
fully written out by both Mr. Cook and his family 
physician, Dr. Bundy, a Harvard medical gradu- 
ate. Their detailed narration, showing their 
painstaking care to guard against deception or 
mistake, I have not space to give, but they, with 
the three other male members of the company, 
published the following brief sworn statement, 
which will serve our present purpose: 

"At the house of Epes Sargent, on the evening 
of Saturday, March 15, 1880, the undersigned 
saw two clean slates placed face to face with a 
bit of slate pencil between them. We all held our 
hands clasped around the edges of the two slates. 
The hands of Mr. Watkins, the psychic, also 
clasped the slates. In this position we all dis- 
tinctly heard the pencil moving, and on opening 
the slates found an intelligent message in a strong 
masculine hand in answer to a question asked by 
one of the company. Afterward two slates were 
clamped together with strong brass fixtures and 
held at arm's length by Mr. Cook while the rest 
of the company and the psychic held their hands 
in full view on the table. After a moment of 
waiting the slates were opened and a message in 
a feminine hand was found on one of the inner 
surfaces. There were five lighted gas-burners in 



26 MAN'S TOMORROW 

the room at the time. We can not apply to these 
facts any theory of fraud, and we do not see how 
the writing can be explained unless matter, in the 
slate pencil, was moved without contact." 

Mr. Cook also in his lecture told his audience 
that this same Mr. Watkins read correctly that 
same evening what had by different members been 
secretly written on slips of paper afterward 
closely folded into pellets and thrown promiscu- 
ously on the table. 

A. R. Wallace, the eminent English naturalist 
already referred to, describing in the London 
"Spectator" a similar experiment in which he per- 
sonally participated in 1877, remarks: "I my- 
self cleaned and tied up the slates ; I kept my 
hand on them all the time; they never went out 
of my sight for a moment ; I named the word to be 
written and the manner of writing it after they 
were thus secured and held by me." 

Colonel T. W. Higginson, in a sworn affidavit, 
testifies, among other things, that a guitar, after 
it was placed by him "in such a position as to 
guard it from possibility of contact, was played 
upon accurately and gracefully, that the accom- 
paniments were extraordinary apart from the 
mystery of their origin." In conclusion he says: 
"The question of the spiritual origin is not now 
raised; it is simply a question of fraud or gen- 
uineness. If I have not satisfactory evidence of 
the genuineness of these phenomena which I have 
just described, then there is no such thing as evi- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 27 

dence, and all the fabric of natural science may 
be a mass of imposture. And when I find on ex- 
amination that facts similar to these have been 
observed by hundreds of intelligent persons in 
various places for several years back, I am dis- 
posed humbly to remember the maxim attributed 
to Arago, 'He is a rash man who outside of pure 
mathematics pronounces the word impossible. 9 " 

Prof. William Crookes, of London, relates hav- 
ing seen and heard an accordion played on while 
it was enclosed in a wire network and not touched 
by any visible hand. He also testifies : "Under 
the strictest test conditions I have more than once 
had a solid, self-luminous crystalline body placed 
in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any 
person in the room. In the light I have seen a 
luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side 
table, break off a sprig and carry it to a lady; 
and on some occasions I have seen a similar lumi- 
nous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand 
and carry small objects about." He even goes so 
far as to affirm that he has seen in the full blaze 
of electric light spirit forms enter and leave closed 
and carefully guarded rooms. 

If it should be urged that these apparent ma- 
terializations can not be actual verities, that thor- 
oughly organized flesh-and-blood bodies, with 
garments on like their old ones, could not thus ap- 
pear and disappear, spiritists might reply to their 
Christian critics that it is recorded of Christ after 
his crucifixion that he ate with his disciples, in- 



28 MAN'S TOMORROW 

vited the doubting Thomas to thrust his fingers 
into the print of the nails, and yet readily passed 
through closed doors, and finally before a great 
concourse of people was lifted from the earth and 
vanished out of sight, and that accounts of simi- 
lar apparitions and materializations may be met 
with all through the books of the Bible; and they 
might reply to scientists that such manipulation 
of matter by spirit as the passing of seeming 
solids through solids without any known disinte- 
gration is no more improbable than the existence 
of the much-talked-of and universally accepted 
luminiferous ether with its seemingly contradic- 
tory properties, being, as Herschel and Jevons 
affirm, an infinitely solid adamant, having a pres- 
sure of seventeen billion pounds to the square 
inch, yet viewless, permeating all substances, and 
offering no perceptible obstruction to the millions 
of worlds that are constantly whirling through it. 
The fact is, the nature of matter, the different 
conditions it may be in, and the kind and degree 
of control which force and spirit have over it, 
are subjects that are still wrapped in the pro- 
foundest mystery, and our theories concerning 
them are liable at any moment to betray their 
need of radical revision. It would be well for the 
wisest of us to refrain from dogmatizing and set- 
ting boundaries to the possible in Nature. The 
poet has truly said, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 29 

There are stranger things in heaven and earth, 

Horatio, 
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy! " 

Let us weigh the evidence with all due care and 
candor, apply scientific tests when we can, bravely 
accept the facts, however mysterious they may be, 
when clearly and conclusively shown, and follow 
where they lead. It is to be foolishly overcautious 
to refuse to accept facts until we can explain 
them. Can we explain how seventy-two tele- 
graphic communications can be sent over the same 
wire at the same time? Yet this was done at the 
World's Fair at Chicago. But we should be es- 
pecially on our guard not to misinterpret the facts 
after we have once found them. It is much easier 
to establish their verity than to discover their 
nature or their origin. Our senses, the very wit- 
nesses we most trust, widely mislead us unless we 
are on our guard. It was a great many centuries 
before mankind believed that the sun did not re- 
volve around the earth, that the earth was not 
flat, or that the sky was not solid. The Coper- 
nican theory encountered the most persistent and 
bitter opposition because people stoutly insisted 
on believing what they saw, or thought they saw, 
not knowing then, what we know now, that there 
is nothing so deceptive as appearances. The baby 
reaching out its hand to grasp the moon does 
what we do over again in our thoughtless haste 
even after we come to mature years, believing the 
senses before their testimony is corrected by rea- 



30 MAN'S TOMORROW 

son and experience. It is difficult for even the 
wisest and most mature among us to realize how 
radically our sense-perceptions have thus been 
modified, how little we rely on what they affirm in 
reference to the ordinary and oft-repeated phe- 
nomena of life. For instance, there are flashed 
over the optic nerve to the brain two images of 
everything we see. Those images are upside down 
and represent the object in different locations and 
give the apparent and not the real dimensions. 
These errors had at the first to be corrected 
slowly by experience. They are now made right 
instantaneously by unconscious automatic action. 
The result secured through the stereoscope is a 
case in point. By this instrument two distinct 
plane pictures of an object are simultaneously 
presented to the mind. A combination is at once 
effected, giving to it a concept of corporeity, i.e., 
of the third dimension — the object standing out 
apparently in full relief. By a skillful distribu- 
tion of light and shade and taking heed to the 
laws of perspective, artists succeed in bringing 
out like results on the canvas. 

New sights, those out of the ordinary, are often 
misleading. The mirage of the desert still allures 
thirsty travelers with hopes never to be realized. 
It takes every individual a long time to accurately 
locate the causes of sound, and to the very last we 
find ourselves often in a quandary or provokingly 
deceived. How difficult, almost impossible, it is 
for us to realize, what is actually the fact that 



MAN'S TOMORROW 31 

sounds are but sensations in the very mind itself! 
The frequent disorders of the body, and the still 
more frequent unhealthy disturbances of the 
mind through passions and hopes and alarms, 
make the reports of the senses still more untrust- 
worthy. The wide variance in the accounts of 
events by conscientious eyewitnesses is thus 
largely to be accounted for. We find it extremely 
difficult to eliminate, or to make due allowance 
for this so-called "personal equation." We should 
also, when tempted to ascribe to supernatural 
causes all mysterious phenomena, keep in mind 
how profoundly ignorant we are yet of the re- 
sources of the causes that are classed as natural 
in the intricately organized world without us or 
the still more intricately organized world within. 

I think we can safely say that after we have 
sifted out from the great mass of professed spirit 
manifestations those which we can not wholly free 
from the suspicion of fraud or of self-deception, 
there are a great many left, thoroughly authenti- 
cated, that can be accounted for only as the results 
either of occult natural forces or of powers largely 
undeveloped and unrealized, belonging to our own 
complex being, or else to outside spiritual influ- 
ences entering in through postern gates which for 
some wise purpose have here and there been sug- 
gestively left ajar. 

F. W. H. Myers, one of the leading members of 
the English Society for Psychical Research, al- 
ready alluded to, has announced that he has be- 



32 MAN'S TOMORROW 

come convinced by his investigations "of continued 
personal existence after death, and of at least occa- 
sional communication with those who have passed 
away"; and Richard Hodgson, LL.D., the secre- 
tary of the American branch of this society, has 
expressed the same conviction. Rev. M. J. Sav- 
age, Boston's distinguished Unitarian divine, cites 
numerous instances, which he personally vouches 
for in his volume on Psychics, that he frankly 
confesses he is unable to account for on any other 
hypothesis. 

It is, however, wise for the most of us to delay 
adopting the last set of causes until we individu- 
ally become fully satisfied that the other two are 
wholly inadequate to produce the phenomena. 
The fact that mankind have all down the centuries 
made haste to pronounce as supernatural what 
they could not at first understand, and have had 
to acknowledge their blunder again and again 
when reluctantly convinced by the overwhelming 
proofs of science, should place us on our guard. 
The world was once thought to be swarming with 
gods and goddesses, nymphs and naiads and 
gnomes and fairies. These mysterious powers 
we now call natural forces. We have found out 
their laws, the conditions that unfetter them, and, 
having rid ourselves of our former superstitious 
fears and reverence, we harness them to our ma- 
chinery without scruple and make them draw our 
trains of trade. 

Instances of telepathy have from time to 



MAN'S TOMORROW 33 

time come to light which furnish still other revela- 
tions of power, apparently wholly without the 
range of the known limitations of these present 
tangible bodies that hem us in. These as yet in- 
explicable phenomena of mind-reading that have 
been accepted by the Society for Psychical Re- 
search and by many psychologists outside as sci- 
entifically established, show that soul touches soul 
somehow by direct impressment — that not only 
spiritual vision but spiritual speech can now be 
classed among our experiences. 

Sir Oliver Lodge asserts that the facts of telep- 
athy must be regarded as practically established; 
that they open a new chapter in science and are 
of an importance which cannot be exaggerated. 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, during his visit to 
England in 1888, while conversing informally one 
evening with Bishop Ellicott, Dr. Samuel Smiles, 
and Rev. H. R. Haweis, remarked: "I think we 
are all unconsciously conscious of each other's 
brain waves at times ; the fact is, words and even 
signs are a very poor sort of language compared 
with the direct telegraphy between souls. The 
mistake we make is to suppose that the soul is cir- 
cumscribed and imprisoned by the body. Now, 
the truth is, I believe, I extend a good way out- 
side my body, at least three or four feet all 
around, and so do you, and it is our extensions 
that meet. Before words pass, or we shake hands, 
our souls have exchanged impressions, and they 
never lie." 



34 MAN'S TOMORROW 

In one of our leading magazines there have re- 
cently appeared two articles from a prominent 
American writer, S. L. Clemens, giving a large 
number of well-authenticated instances of this 
most astounding feat of sending our ideas over 
leagues of distance without the aid of articulate 
speech, facial expression, or gesture, or any ap- 
parent bodily assistance whatever, or of any 
known force or communicating medium. Such 
like phenomena of telepathy have naturally led 
many to query whether our spirits are such close 
prisoners, after all, as we have been accustomed 
to believe — whether they do not sometimes roam 
at will, leaving their ponderable bodies behind 
them and taking their imponderable ones to bear 
them company and do their bidding. Others have 
been led to suggest — what seems to me the simpler 
and more natural explanation — that the circuit 
of our direct spiritual impressment is, under cer- 
tain favoring conditions not yet understood, far 
wider than we have been accustomed to suppose. 

Camille Flammarion, the distinguished French 
astronomer, who has given these subjects of telep- 
athy and apparition most thoughtful attention, 
remarks in one of his papers : "All we can now 
admit is that a person does not really transfer his 
personality, his spirit, or psychic principle, into 
the presence of the observer, but that there is an 
action of spirit on spirit at a distance. We may 
admit that each thought is accompanied by cere- 
bral atomic movements, for physiologists admit 



MAN'S TOMORROW 35 

this. Our psychic force gives rise to etheric vi- 
brations which are transmitted to a distance, as 
are all vibrations of ether, and become percep- 
tible to minds which vibrate in unison with ours. 
The transformation of a psychic action into 
etheric vibration is reciprocal, perhaps analogous 
to those seen in the telephone where the receptive 
plate, similar to the one which transmits, repeats 
the sonorous vibration. The action of one mind 
upon another is manifested in various ways — 
sometimes by the complete perception of the being, 
sometimes through hearing a well-known voice 
or unusual sounds. Mind acts on mind as it does 
in cases of mental suggestion, at a distance, a 
phenomenon not more extraordinary than the ac- 
tion of iron on a magnet, or that of the moon on 
the earth, or the carrying of the voice by electric- 
ity, or the revelation of the chemical constituents 
of the stars by spectrum analysis of their light, 
and all other marvels of contemporary science, 
only it belongs to a higher order, and can put us 
on the road to a psychical understanding of the 
human being." 

The recent achievements in wireless telegraphy 
are strongly confirmatory of this interpretation 
of the eminent astronomer. The fact that electric 
waves are sent with inconceivable speed without 
any conducting wires over thousands of leagues 
of distance and finally picked up by a receiving 
instrument, and their thought-message made mat- 
ter of record, proves to us conclusively the actual 



36 MAN'S TOMORROW 

existence of some transmitting medium diffused 
everywhere, analogous to, if not identical with, 
the luminiferous ether through which light trav- 
els over the interstellar spaces. 

Right here we have revealed to us a possible 
medium through which the cerebral atomic move- 
ments may be propagated when widely separated 
souls come into telepathic touch. 

The one class of phenomena is no more myste- 
rious than the other and is as clearly within the 
circle of possibilities and even of probabilities. 

The many cases on record of persons, in great 
distress, in imminent peril, and in the throes of 
dissolution, revealing to distant friends at the 
very instant by apparition or thought-message 
their critical condition, find in these suggestions 
of this great savant a possible and indeed a very 
plausible explanation on a wholly naturalistic 
basis. But in the case of persons who are dead 
we unfortunately lack the requisite means for de- 
termining beyond dispute whether they have ac- 
tually reappeared. There is no reasonable doubt 
but that closely resembling forms have been seen 
and apparently the old familiar voices heard, 
but what those forms and voices actually are, or 
how or whence they come, are still open questions. 
In the case of messages from the dying, the dis- 
tressed, or the imperiled we can test whether the 
message was received at exactly the date the crisis 
occurred, and this has frequently been done, but 
in case of the dead no such basis for comparison 



MAN'S TOMORROW 37 

is afforded. Whatever hypothesis we adopt we 
encounter serious objections which we have not 
jet been able to set aside. Scientists may later on 
make new discoveries or formulate some new 
theory that will fit the facts. We must still watch 
and wait. But investigations thus far have rea- 
sonably well established that our direct will-power 
over matter extends at times beyond the immedi- 
ate confines of our bodies, and to an astonishing 
degree ; that we have acute sense-perceptions with- 
out the aid of our bodily sense-organs, being able 
to see with closed eyes through opaque substances 
over leagues of distance and in the densest dark- 
ness, to hear the voices of our friends while con- 
versing in ordinary tones and sitting within closed 
apartments across the wide breadth of a conti- 
nent; that we can be brought into such close 
spirit-touch with others as to interchange 
thoughts without speech or any outward expres- 
sion; that we can by mesmeric or hypnotic influ- 
ence master the will, sway the passions, tempo- 
rarily dethrone the reason, kindle the fancy, even 
submerge the whole personal consciousness of an- 
other coming within the charmed circle of this 
mysterious outreaching of the soul; that we can, 
when under peculiar conditions unknown as yet, 
so capture the conceptive faculties of others, even 
though miles away, by the subtle power of our 
personality that they will firmly believe that we 
have actually appeared before them in bodily 
form, that they have clasped our hands, heard 



38 MAN'S TOMORROW 

our voiees, seen our very faces aglow with the 
old-time light of the life within. 

How significant these discoveries ! How they 
exalt and enlarge our conceptions of the resources 
of these indwelling spirits of ours ! Yet these tri- 
umphings of the soul over its material surround- 
ings so transcend the ordinary and the expected, 
and have been so compromisingly associated with 
fraud and superstition and self-deceit, that the 
majority of scientists have until the last two or 
three decades treated the accounts with scornful 
incredulity and indifference. Dr. William B. 
Carpenter, F. R. S., and corresponding mem- 
ber of the Institute of France, one of the most 
distinguished physiologists of this century, even 
went so far as stoutly to contend to the very last 
that mesmerism, clairvoyance, spiritism, and men- 
tal telegraphy were, all of them, either delusions 
or frauds, symptoms of morbid mental states, 
products of intent expectancy, or cunning tricks 
of impostors. He investigated long and care- 
fully and yet secured only negative results ; but 
ought his testimony to outweigh the positive tes- 
timony of a score of others equally eminent in 
scientific attainments and equally candid and care- 
ful in their search after truth? There are now 
quite a large number of scientists ready to con- 
cede that even such extraordinary and unlooked- 
for powers as I have just enumerated have ac- 
tually been manifested by certain living persons 
under certain conditions yet unknown, but 



MAN'S TOMORROW 39 

whether any of the strange phenomena that have 
come to light are properly attributable to the 
spirits of the dead they still consider extremely 
doubtful, although many of the manifestations 
are as yet otherwise seemingly inexplicable. The 
messages thus conveyed are most of them so in- 
consequential, so foreign in tone to anything we 
would naturally look for from our friends who 
have passed into the other life, they are on so 
commonplace a level, many of them so trivial, so 
untrue, so apparently earthborn, that they leave 
us still in a state of gravest doubt whether, after 
all, from the lips of the dead the seal of secrecy 
has really been broken, or from their forms and 
faces the veil of invisibility ever been drawn aside, 
though we passionately long to have them come 
back and tell us of their fate and give us some 
token of their continuing love. 

But even should we for the present hold in 
abeyance our belief on this point, which it would 
be eminently wise to do, as investigations are 
now at last being prosecuted with refreshing 
vigor, have we not still certified to us through 
scientific research in these new fields facts that af- 
ford us clear intimations of the approaching per- 
manent transcendence of the spirit over gross 
matter with its clogging and disintegrating ten- 
dencies, and in these intimations have we not 
Heaven-sent prophecies of an endless life? 

Of course while this last point of spirit influ- 
ence is left undetermined we have no demonstra- 



40 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tive proof of immortality, but have simply wid- 
ened our horizon, found the soul to be a less close 
prisoner than we once thought, but still a pris- 
oner, organically linked with matter. Concerning 
the soul's real nature, as well as its ultimate des- 
tiny, science, though affording us most wonder- 
fully reassuring intimations, furnishes us no ab- 
solute, certain knowledge. 

The psychical possibilities of man are appar- 
ently far beyond anything we have been accus- 
tomed to think, and those already revealed offer 
most convincing evidences of the existence of a 
second body highly etherealized and fully 
equipped with organs of sense, and with command 
over matter far outstripping the gross clay tene- 
ment it hides within, and through whose open por- 
tals at times it blazes forth in ineffable glory as 
in the face of Moses, of Stephen, and of the trans- 
figured Christ. Prof. Stewart and Prof. Tait, in 
their work on "The Unseen Universe," say that 
"we are logically constrained if we regard the 
principle of continuity and the doctrine of immor- 
tality as both true, to admit the existence of some 
frame or organ not of this earth, which survives 
dissolution. It is possible that there have been, 
and that there are, occasional manifestations of 
this spiritual nature." 

John Weiss well remarks: "Nothing can save 
the soul from collapsing into the blind forces of 
the world but the preservation of its identity, 
and that can not be done without a frame to hold 



MAN'S TOMORROW 41 

it, a system of organs by which it can express 
spiritual function. To prevent this collapse and 
preserve that continuity rightly so insisted on by 
men of science, there must be a present duplex 
organism in order that the soul may still be 
clothed upon directly after death has done its 
work; and in order that its thought-life may con- 
tinue without a break, its touch be still kept up 
through sense-perceptions, through memory, and 
through its various associations with its world- 
environment, it must continue to retain some 
bodily organic equipment, rendered invisible as a 
subtle breath or aura, of a flamy or airy nature 
and diffused through the whole body." 

F. G. Fairfield, following out the suggestions 
of Dr. Maudsley, the eminent alienist, in his 
analysis of Swendenborg's mental idiosyncrasies, 
has elaborated a theory as to the origin of clair- 
voyance, mesmerism, and alleged spirit manifes- 
tations that will well repay careful consideration. 
It certainly commends itself as at least a fair 
working hypothesis, and I shall not be surprised 
if it contributes not a little to the final solution 
of some of the deep mysteries that still shroud 
the nature and^ destiny of the soul. He grants 
that it has been incontestably established that 
certain persons have the extraordinary gift of see- 
ing with closed eyes through usually opaque sub- 
stances ; of lifting ponderous bodies without con- 
tact, even of floating their own as on invisible 
wings; of holding thought-commerce with and 



42 MAN'S TOMORROW 

exercising dominion over minds widely removed; 
of being the means through which phantom hands 
and forms have appeared, having for a time all 
the semblance of life and then fading away as mys- 
teriously as they came; but he at the same time 
contends that these strange phenomena are rather 
preternatural than supernatural, the achieve- 
ments of spirits still in the body instead of those 
who have passed out of it; that they are brought 
about through an element which he designates as 
nerve-aura, not identical with electricity though 
correlated with it, as also with light and the other 
forces ; that through it voluntary impulse is 
transmitted from the brain to the muscles, though 
less rapidly according to Helmholtz, than electric- 
ity travels; that it is capable of acting at consid- 
erable distances through the atmosphere, is more 
or less subject to the will of the individual who 
emits it, partakes of volitional properties, is sus- 
ceptible to sensory impressions and unconscious 
action, can be condensed into visible forms body- 
ing forth the flitting fancies of the controlling 
mind or of the mind en rapport with it — that, in 
short, it is of the nature of an emanating ether 
having the molecular properties, motor and sen- 
sory, of nerve-tissue itself though in lessened in- 
tensity. This aura, he contends, enters into inti- 
mate molecular relations with surrounding ob- 
jects, so that in certain peculiar nervous states 
the will is brought into the same close touch with 
things outside the body that it continually main- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 43 

tains with the muscular fibers within it. This aura 
being also correlated with light and being capable 
of permeating the most solid substances, converts 
opaqueness into transparency as by electric flash. 
It continues to be the same ready medium for the 
transmission of thought beyond the boundary of 
the body as it is within it, and thus brings minds 
miles apart into as close contact as if they were 
working through the convolutions of the same 
brain. 

He has gathered much interesting data in sup- 
port and illustration of this hypothesis which I 
regret I have not space to recite in sufficient de- 
tail to give them their due significance. He con- 
tends that our every act is but a transformation 
of nerve-force into motor, that the power of cer- 
tain animals to evolve at will a phosphorescent 
glow is but an instance of the correlation of this 
nerve-ether with light, as is also the quite distinct 
halo that has been observed by the distinguished 
Dr. Brown-Sequard and others to envelop the 
head of the patient and to radiate into the 
room in some cases of consumption and of epilep- 
tic seizure, and, perhaps I may add, as is that in- 
definable light that suffuses the human face in 
those supreme moments of intense excitement 
when the soul is at its best. He further contends 
that the correlation of this ether with electricity 
is shown in the shock given by certain eels and 
fishes. He explains the magnetic attraction or re- 
pellence of some natures, and the power possessed 



44 MAN'S TOMORROW 

by well-nigh all of us to make our presence felt 
before our approach is discovered — a fact so 
common that an adage has grown out of it, as but 
the reflex action caused in others through this 
same connecting medium of nerve-ether. He 
holds that the dynamic displays are but akin to 
those resulting from the disturbances of electric 
equilibrium, and if, as is affirmed by Faraday, 
there is enough electricity in a drop of water 
to produce a stroke of lightning in case the 
equilibrium is destroyed, we can readily see how 
it is possible for the human will, by causing a like 
disturbance in this out-going nerve-aura, to dis- 
play such marvelous mastery over the ever-acting 
force of gravitation, and also how it is possible 
for sufficient force to be stored in the cells of the 
brain, if suddenly correlated as motor energy, to 
condense this mysterious ether into phantom 
forms incarnating for a passing moment the cre- 
ations of its fancy. 

F. J. Hudson, in a very able treatise on "The 
Law of Psychic Phenomena," has, on the theory of 
the duality of the human mind, advocated by 
Prof. Wigan, Dr. Brown-Sequard, Prof. Proctor, 
and other eminent investigators, founded a very 
plausible explanation of the origin of these mys- 
terious phenomena we have been considering. 
"The subjective mind is," as this author contends, 
"the soul or spirit, and is itself an organized en- 
tity, possessing independent powers and func- 
tions, while the objective mind is merely the func- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 45 

tion of the physical brain and possesses no power 
whatever independently of the physical organism. 
The one possesses dynamic force independently 
of the body ; the other does not. The one is capa- 
ble of sustaining an existence independently of 
the body; the other dies with it." The operations 
of the one are unconscious, often of lightning-like 
rapidity, and as yet inexplicable. It is gifted 
with an absolutely perfect memory, is capable of 
only deductive forms of reasoning and is under 
the control of suggestions emanating from with- 
out or from the other, the objective self. Those 
exceptional mathematical and musical gifts dis- 
played by such phenomenal characters as the boy 
Colburn and the idiotic Blind Tom come from this 
subjective self. The astonishing displays of gen- 
ius also here find origin ; and to this source all 
those occult powers may be traced which still puz- 
zle philosophers and scientists. 

Francis Galton takes the same view of genius 
in his "English Men of Science," defining it as au- 
tomatic activity of the mind, as distinguished 
from the effort of the will, ideas coming instan- 
taneously as by inspiration, the man of genius 
being driven, rather than himself holding the 
reins. 

Mozart's description of his own experiences is 
in consonance with this : "If one has the spirit of 
a composer he writes because he cannot help it. 
Whence and how my ideas come I know not, nor 
can I force them. Those that please me I retain. 



46 MAN'S TOMORROW 

They fire my soul — the subject enlarges — becomes 
methodized and defined, and the whole, though 
long, stands almost complete and finished in my 
mind so that I can survey it like a fine picture or 
a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in 
my imagination the parts successively, but I hear 
them as it were all at once." 

Lowell tells us that his "Commemoration Ode," 
which the literary world had received with such 
acclaim, was an improvisation, struck off at a 
single white heat. Two days before he was to 
recite it before that distinguished Harvard as- 
sembly in 1865 he remarked to a friend that to 
compose it was an utter imposssibility, that "he 
was hopelessly dumb, as dull as a door mat, but 
that the next day something gave him a jog and 
the whole thing came from him with vehement 
speed, in a resistless rush, and that all night he 
sat up writing it out clear; that he was so wrapt 
with the fervor of conception sleep and appetite 
fled from him, that it literally made him lean, that 
enough of virtue went out of him to make him 
weak and nervous for a fortnight after." 

Of that perhaps equally celebrated poem en- 
titled "The Cathedral," composed four years 
later, he remarked while recalling the past to a 
friend that "it wrote itself, that all of a sudden 
it was there, that in his second copy he made 
many changes, as he thought, for the better, then 
laid the poem away in his desk to cool for three 
weeks, that when he came to print he put back 



MAN'S TOMORROW 47 

every one of the original readings which he had 
changed, those which had sprung up in his mind 
at the first onset, being so far superior to those 
which subsequent reflection suggested." 

Some there are who, not without reason, regard 
these higher, rarer, gifts of genius as premoni- 
tions of a life beyond, evidences of a larger per- 
sonality than we are conscious of now, or can 
utilize fully in this present life, consisting, in the 
words of Browning's Paracelsus, 

Of faculties., displayed in vain, but born, 
To prosper in some better sphere." 

But the interpretations by these investigators, 
suggestive and ingenious as they certainly are, 
are in some respects open to a like criticism of in- 
adequacy made by them against others, for while 
they seem to furnish a key to many more classes 
of phenomena than those already noted, they still 
leave unaccounted for phenomena equally as start- 
ling and important. The Society of Psychical 
Research has, therefore, still left to it the task of 
sifting out all such facts as are incontestably es- 
tablished and are sufficiently characteristic and 
inclusive to represent the question in all its essen- 
tial phases, and then, with the help of the 
theories already propounded, to formulate a new 
one if possible, answering fully the conditions of 
the problem. 

But need we wait for the results of this exhaus- 
tive research and the final settlement of the ques- 



48 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tion whether these manifestations are messages 
from the dead or deeds of the living before we 
recognize in them clear prophetic intimation of a 
life beyond? For even if they are but the deeds 
of the living, yet all along down the centuries to 
the present hour have they not come to us as reve- 
lations of most astounding possibilities, not only 
in Nature, but in the human soul, placed for the 
present beyond our reach to master and make ser- 
viceable, as if in waiting for some far-off divine 
event to bring us into our rich inheritance of per- 
fect and permanent supremacy? 

Is not the fact that these apparitional, telep- 
athic, clairvoyant, telekinetic, and other occult 
powers of the mind, such as that strangely per- 
fect memory of the subjective self, and its iner- 
rant deductive reasoning, its intuitional grasp of 
truth, are called out into full play only under in- 
tensely abnormal conditions, and consequently of 
practically little service now and here, — is not 
this fact, I repeat, strongly indicative that these 
gifts, in embryo, are held in reserve to answer 
the higher behests of some other, larger life be- 
yond. Are they not golden prophecies to gladden 
our hours of doubt? Has not a kind Providence 
sent them as foreglints of glories yet to come? 
Voices from out these mysteries seem to whisper 
to us, "Wait. The day of your deliverance from 
the thrall of matter, of your supreme and abid- 
ing sovereignty over it with all its contending 
forces, is recorded in the great Book of Divine 



MAN'S TOMORROW 49 

Decrees. The pencilings of gray light that now 
and then break in through the half-open gate- 
ways of the sky amid the night shadows of the life 
that now is, are harbingers of that great awaken- 
ing, of that larger, richer, fuller life that is yet 
to come." 



MAN'S TOMORROW 



II 

Scientific research has brought to light still 
further facts and led to still further theories 
tending greatly to strengthen the probabilities of 
a future life. While they yet fall short of posi- 
tive proof they are so interesting and suggestive 
that we can ill afford not to give them our most 
thoughtful attention. In the work already al- 
luded to, entitled "The Unseen Universe," by Prof. 
Balfour Stewart and Prof. P. G. Tait, some of 
these facts with their interpretation and bear- 
ings on this great question may be found learn- 
edly elaborated. A brief allusion must here suf- 
fice, and rather than simply outline what they 
have said I will give the thought as it lies in my 
own mind after receiving their help, 

Herschel and Clark Maxwell affirm that the ele- 
mental atoms, of which sixty-four or more differ- 
ent kinds have been discovered, have all the marks 
of manufactured articles. No means have yet 
been found for disintegrating them or effecting in 
them any change whatever. They are intimately 
correlated, and enter multiform chemical combi- 
nations with mathematical precision after certain 
methods and under certain unalterably fixed con- 
ditions, and from such substratum all the worlds 
have been built. It has also become a settled con- 
clusion of science that the present order of things 

50 



MAN'S TOMORROW 51 

is slowly but surely approaching an end ; that the 
universe is running down ; that there is an unceas- 
ing progress toward a state of universal equilib- 
rium, of complete rest; that all the suns, which 
are but condensed balls of the original fire mist, 
are radiating, unused, out into immensity, incal- 
culable amounts of energy every hour as they 
cool and shrink; that satellites are one by one 
gradually falling into their central suns ; that the 
very sun-clusters themselves as their heat is 
thrown off draw closer together and will become 
in the end each a solid mass ; and that these glob- 
ular resultants of the vast nebulae of the skies will 
also in their turn meet and fuse until but a single 
lone star will hang in space, the fires and light 
and life of which will also at the last die out, and 
darkness and silence and death settle down upon 
it. 

While it is true that no human imagination can 
possibly conceive of the immense periods of time 
that must elapse before the end comes, yet there 
is no force known in Nature that can avert this 
fate or perceptibly delay it. Any order or plan 
that is thus so arranged that it is certainly to 
cease must as certainly have begun. This is ax- 
iomatic, for on a moment's reflection we will see 
how utterly absurd it is to suppose that anything 
can have been eternally approaching a goal that 
has been fixed, or that a goal could have ever been 
fixed at a distance infinitely remote, for this in- 
volves a flat contradiction. There can be no plan 



52 MAN'S TOMORROW 

or scheme so devised as to be certain of comple- 
tion that is not strictly finite. Everything des- 
tined to have an end must have had a beginning. 

The theory advanced by Sir William Thomp- 
son and Prof. Helmholtz, independently of each 
other, that the first germs of life came to this 
planet through meteoric showers, would not, even 
if true, serve at all to prove the suggestion made 
by them that life, the organized life, of which 
alone we have knowledge, may be as old as mat- 
ter itself, for the most ancient of all the worlds, 
on which vitalization first began, must have passed 
through a fire and gaseous period precisely like 
our own, during which no germ could possibly 
have subsisted. In this same connection it may be 
said that experimenters have also signally failed 
to prove that life has had a spontaneous origin, 
is a constituent element of matter, one of the forms 
of physical force, but rather they have reached 
the conclusion, though reluctantly, that only from 
life can life come, that it can not create physical 
force or be converted into it, but is an entity in 
itself. Huxley, Tyndall, nearly all leading sci- 
entists, concede this. 

When science affirms that this visible universe 
has had a beginning it does not design to state 
that it came from nothing, for that is impossible, 
but that in some past period an intelligent will by 
a new combination of already existing matter and 
force, which must be regarded as at the first ema- 
nations from the divine nature, gave rise to the 



MAN'S TOMORROW 53 

present so-called elemental atoms, which consti- 
tute the substratum of all known substances. 
Whether either matter or force ever did exist 
apart from each other, or ever could, we have no 
means of determining, but we are convinced that 
it is only under and by means of their present 
combinations that their existence is made known 
to us through our senses. Matter would be 
utterly invisible were it not for the revealing 
power of the very forces which hide within it. 
After the lapse of long ages of evolutionary 
change following the manufacture of these atoms 
new cosmic forces stepped in and moulded them 
into worlds ; then, still farther on, when the time 
was ripe, vital forces appeared and played their 
part in the unfolding of the vast plan. They 
came from the unseen, as did the atomic forces 
before them, as did also the atomic walls them- 
selves that still continue to shut in these myste- 
rious prisoners. The vital forces build up organ- 
isms, each after its kind, live in and reign over 
them their appointed season, and then vanish again 
into the unseen. At the last nothing will be left 
of all this grand pageant that we call the universe 
but a single motionless, lifeless black ball, a burnt- 
out cinder, made up of the original atoms, and as 
these are, as has been said, evidently manufac- 
tured articles, and manufactured for this specific 
purpose, it is reasonable to suppose that when 
this purpose is attained and matter lies dead in 
space, the atoms themselves will, by the same all- 



54 MAN'S TOMORROW 

directing intelligent power, be dissolved and pass 
back again into that mysterious unseen existence 
out of which they issued forth. 

The clear inference from all this is, although 
of course no positive proof is claimed, that the 
invisible world is the permanent, the eternal one, 
while the visible is the finite, the temporal, serving 
merely as a passive medium for great groups of 
unseen forces, one after another, to enter in for a 
season and then to pass out again into the un- 
known dark ; that human souls which are the final 
consummation of this marvelous evolution of the 
ages, instead of being engulfed in nothingness 
when they vanish into the unseen, are but ad- 
vanced to another stage of their life's eternity, 
enter upon still another period of their endless 
growth, approach still nearer in their attributes 
and perfectness to the great Oversoul whose image 
they bear. 

These learned authors, Stewart and Tait, as- 
sure us that within thirty or forty years it has 
gradually dawned upon scientists that there is 
something besides matter which has as much claim 
to recognition as an objective reality, and that 
they have logically reached the conclusion that 
there is an invisible universe from which life as 
well as matter proceeds, and that immortality is 
possible without a break of continuity. 

W. F. Evans, in a thoughtful volume, entitled 
"Soul and Body," very aptly declares: "The 
underlying reality in what we call matter is 



MAN'S TOMORROW 55 

nothing but spirit. Material things, as they are 
only effects, can have no independent existence. 
They have the root of their existence in mind, for 
all things owe their origin and continued being to 
God, who is an infinite, everywhere present, spirit. 
The materialistic school of philosophy, reasoning 
from the fallacies of the senses and rising no 
higher, sees a realm of matter and supposes mind 
or spirit to be one of its functions. The idealistic 
or metaphysical school, reasoning from conscious- 
ness, believes in a world of spirit, and that matter 
is only its sensuous manifestation. In this latter 
view the deepest realities of the universe are not 
material but spiritual." 

If now, laying aside the telescope with its 
almost illimitable sweep of vision and closing 
earth's ponderous rock records of the vast geo- 
logic periods of the past, we take up the micro- 
scope and scalpel and enter the regions of the 
minute, we shall come upon facts that give rise 
to presumptions of a life beyond even stronger 
than those presented in the learned treatise to 
which I have just referred, although still falling 
short of any positive proof. It will be interesting 
and helpful to note exactly how far also in this 
department of research science has succeeded in 
solving the great secret of human destiny. Mi- 
croscopists assure us that each body with all its 
complicate adjustments is the joint work of a vast 
company of bioplasts, invisible toilers, imbedded 
in minute specks of transparent and seemingly 



56 MAN'S TOMORROW 

structureless jelly, and that these tiny workmen 
all sprung from a single progenitor lodged inside 
an infinitesimal atom. The specialist turns the 
full blaze of his most improved search-light upon 
that atom, and though found to be throughout 
perfectly transparent, he fails to detect the least 
trace of any occupant or any sign of organiza- 
tion in it; yet while he is looking, the walls begin 
to move like thin curtains and to be pushed out 
here and there into prominence as if by the impa- 
tient hands of some imprisoned spirit. A moment 
later it seizes nutrient particles lying near it, and 
instantly they are transmuted by some hidden 
alchemy into this same colorless, transparent 
jelly; a little farther on, and this mass, being in- 
creased, cuts itself in two, and, strange to say, 
in each half a like living force appears to dwell, 
there being not only two masses, but two distinct 
vital forces, where there was only one before. And 
this proves but the beginning of an extended proc- 
ess of self-division that goes on until a swarming 
colony of individualized workers have come upon 
the scene. To astonish us more, these workers 
are not simply duplicates of each other, as we 
would naturally expect, but are distinguished by 
most marked differences of capacity and of ap- 
pointed lines of action, for out from these specks 
or group of specks of jelly, as from the spinner- 
ets of spiders, are spun variously formed mate- 
rials, each speck or group spinning differently, 
as with self-locomotion they move from point to 



MAN'S TOMORROW 57 

point, one turning out the tough contractile fibers 
of a muscle, another the thin walls of a blood ves- 
sel, others still the white gristle of a tendon, the 
flexible tube of a hair, or the solid pillar of a bone. 
Each seems to have a separate task, a pronounced 
capacity for that task, and a positive repugnance 
to any other. To add still more to our wonder, 
they work in concert, seem to be most intimately 
correlated, so that although never known to con- 
sult together or to have any knowledge of what 
each other is doing, yet, without hesitancy, confu- 
sion, or mistake, move right on tirelessly until, 
their work being accomplished, part is found to 
fit to part with absolute accuracy to the minut- 
est detail, and the result is a piece of machinery 
the most complicate and at the same time the most 
complete embodiment of unity of design in the 
widest diversity of parts of which we have any 
knowledge or can form any conception. These 
jellylike vitalized points of matter, the dwelling 
places and workshops of the bioplasts, constitute 
about two-fifths of the human body, the rest being 
made up of nutriment and formed material. When 
we die this jelly coagulates, and in consequence 
the body becomes rigid. 

These vitalizing forces may be dislodged from 
their protoplasmic hiding places separately or in 
groups, and the protoplasm will decay like any 
other effete matter despite all our efforts to call 
back the evicted sprites to their old haunts again. 
Bioplasts spring only from bioplasts. Through 



58 MAN'S TOMORROW 

no physical force or chemical combination can 
they possibly be called into being, and into no 
other variety of energy can they possibly be con- 
verted. They stand apart. They come wrapped 
in invisibility, enter upon their work, do it in 
silence and secrecy, and without word of warning 
or token of farewell take their flight. They will 
not affiliate with any other force, but simply mas- 
ter and use it while they can. They accompany 
certain combinations of physical and chemical 
forces, but are not caused by them, and not being 
their product but merely accompaniment, the 
breaking up of the one does not, as far as we 
know, destroy the other, but simply causes their 
disappearance. As they necessarily precede the 
organisms which they build, one would naturally 
ask why may they not live after they are gone 
and build new ones as before? But whether they 
precede those bits of protoplasm in which they 
are first found and which certainly do not survive 
the bodies built out of them, and whether that pro- 
toplasm is not, after all, profoundly organized, 
although with our microscopes we cannot detect 
it, and whether the life of the bioplast is not really 
dependent on the maintenance of that protoplas- 
mic organization, are matters still undetermined. 
It is true Lionel Beale, one of the leading micro- 
scopists of the world, together with Huxley and 
others equally eminent in science, affirms that we 
fail to detect any organization in the bioplasmic 
mass. But this may be due simply to the imper- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 59 

fection of our instruments. We once thought the 
nebulae of the heavens to be but luminous banks 
of mist. We afterwards succeeded in resolving 
them into universes of separate suns. There is 
abundance of room for organization beyond the 
present microscope limit. Joseph Cook, comment- 
ing on these most startling yet fully accredited 
facts in the history of bioplasts, says : "If life 
may exist before organization, why not after? I 
affirm that the microscope begins to have visions 
of man's immortality." Has he not here inad- 
vertently taken as settled what is really still in 
doubt, that protoplasm is structureless and that 
the bioplasts preceded it? As far as our present 
knowledge goes, bioplasts do not exist apart from 
protoplasm. He also says that "there are move- 
ments and life in the protoplasm, and the cause 
of the movements must exist before the move- 
ments." True, but not necessarily before the 
thing moved. We should also note in this connec- 
tion that as all the lower animal organizations as 
well as those in the vegetable kingdom are found 
to be equally the work of bioplasts, Joseph Cook, 
if consistent and logical, would in holding his po- 
sition have to consent to throw wide open the 
gates of endless existence not only to all sentient, 
but even to non-sentient forms of life. 

How are we to account for the differences in 
natural endowment between those little myriad 
body-builders as evidenced in the character of 
their work? Though the multiplication of indi- 



60 MAN'S TOMORROW 

viduals is secured seemingly by simple subdivi- 
sion, the whole vast colony coming from a single 
progenitor which began by mysteriously cutting 
itself in two, yet most radical and constitutional 
differences in aptitude, purpose, and power, be- 
come manifest between the divided parts the mo- 
ment the division is effected, whereas we should 
reasonably expect absolute sameness if the process 
is nothing but self-division. To astonish us more, 
these differences are intimately correlated as these 
skilled artisans and artists, without apparent con- 
sultation, confusion, or delay, set about not only 
elaborating the absorbed nutrients into different 
substances suited to different uses, but molding 
them into widely different forms that prove to be 
so complemental, so suited to each other, that they 
constitute the divergent parts of one grand unified 
plan, and in their intricate yet harmonious co- 
operation give unmistakable evidence of having 
been designed from the first to carry out certain 
comprehensive and far-reaching purposes in or- 
ganic life. 

The skill here displayed is so consummate, the 
inventive resource so seemingly inexhaustible, the 
prescience and the knowledge of natural laws, so 
profound and inerrant, that no thoughtful ob- 
server can for a moment doubt but that a divine 
ideal is here being inwrought into this marvelous 
mechanism and that the work goes forward under 
a divine impulse and by a divine informing. But 
how God's purpose is thus accomplished is not so 



MAN'S TOMORROW 61 

clear. Does he give his personal supervision to 
the working out of every detail? Does he instruct 
and direct every moment every one of the million 
workers that are employed in building up every 
organism? That is not the way science interprets 
the great ongoings of divine purpose. Such 
thought would be in marked dissonance with the 
teachings of all the analogues in Nature, would 
belittle and degrade our conceptions of the modes 
of the divine life. The history of the past teaches 
us that God has employed great secondary causes 
to body forth his ideals through the slowly mov- 
ing centuries. To effect this design, forces seem 
to have been arranged in regular gradation, rank 
above rank, from the lowly ones that work among 
the primal atoms of matter to the archangelic that 
are privileged to enter the very presence chamber 
of Jehovah and serve as his swift-winged messen- 
gers of love. As over the atomic, the chemic, and 
the mechanic forces the bioplastic for a time hold 
sway, so over the bioplastic a higher grade of 
vital force must have been placed in command and 
intrusted with the general plans and specifications 
prepared by the Great Architect. But does this 
second and superior vital force also have a master 
— one still more widely commissioned and more 
highly endowed? This piece of mechanism con- 
structed under its supervision is found in intimate 
and inseparable relation with a world-environ- 
ment, a perfect and continued harmony with which 
is absolutely essential to its further maintenance 



62 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and availability. Does this delegated overseer 
of the bioplasts also superintend the subsequent 
workings of this organism after it has been once 
constructed and set in motion, or is that task as- 
signed to another agent still? Microscopists tell 
us that they have discovered two kinds of nerve- 
fibers having respectively automatic and influen- 
tial arcs at their termini; that in man these are 
blended together by innumerable commissures, yet 
are perfectly distinguishable; that the automatic 
respond promptly and mechanically to the touch 
of the environment, although inert in themselves, 
as are also the influential; that the will-power has 
exclusive control over the influential, and can 
check and modify the automatic to a certain ex- 
tent. 

The frontal lobes of the brain are conceded to 
be the seat of the intellect, but electrical stimula- 
tion of these highest parts of the influential nerv- 
ous mechanism produces, it is said, no muscular 
motion, which fact, coupled with that of its essen- 
tial inertness, shows that it can be set in action 
only by some force which is both wholly exterior 
to itself and wholly different from any of the phy- 
sical forces in the world which environs it. 

Lotze, Ulrici, Wundt, Helmholtz, Draper, Car- 
penter, and Beale, all teach this. It is often 
urged, and I think, with excellent show of reason, 
that the fact of the unity of consciousness and the 
persistence of the sense of personal identity not 
being affected by the continual flux of the atoms 



MAN'S TOMORROW 63 

in the body can be adequately accounted for only 
on the ground of the co-existence of some spiritual 
entity wholly different from the ever-changing 
particles of matter and their inherent forces with 
which it is surrounded and over which it dominates 
and which it skilfully organizes during a few fleet- 
ing moments. The brain does not think any more 
than the eyes see, one simply ministering to 
thought, the other, as the microscope or telescope, 
to sight. These are evidently but helps and in- 
struments to serve the purposes and minister to 
the wants of an invisible something that has taken 
up a temporary abode within. Important parts 
of the organism — an arm or a leg, an ear or an 
eye — may be utterly destroyed and the ego will 
still remain intact. But whether the ego, although 
thus an entity in itself, still lives on after the 
entire organism is resolved back to dust remains 
a mystery. It disappears, and as far as we know 
never returns. 

Some argue that as the soul is as external to 
the body as sound to the ear or light to the eye, 
and as dissolution of these organs does not de- 
stroy the forces which affect them and which they 
are designed to interpret and reveal, so the de- 
struction of the body does not extend to the life 
of the soul. This argument is at fault, as the 
cases are not parallel, an organic or vital union 
existing in the one, a mechanic or a chemic in the 
other. The eye and ear are only media through 
which the forces outside affect the spirit within, 



64 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and these outside forces never for an instant sever 
their union with matter, while the spirit within, 
for aught we can possibly prove, becomes utterly 
divorced. It certainly disappears, and we have 
no knowledge that it ever comes back. 

The materialists are equally at fault when they 
so strenuously insist that because the soul becomes 
unconscious when the brain is injured it must con- 
tinue so when it is destroyed, for, as Rev. Dr. 
Alvah Hovey has ably argued, the soul is still 
organically connected with the brain when the 
brain is simply injured, but utterly parted from 
it when destroyed. While the spirit continues to 
act through a living organ, when the organ suffers 
it must suffer with it, but this does not show that 
it cannot live without it. While it remains in a 
house it must look through the windows of that 
house. If the windows are darkened it must be 
enveloped in the shadow. But for aught we know 
it can open the door and pass out into the broad 
light of day. A similar non sequitur is involved 
in their further insistence that, inasmuch as the 
mind is infantile with the babe, manly with the 
adult, debilitated by disease, doting in the decrepi- 
tude of age, it must be annihilated at death, for 
the changes that are wrought during the different 
stages of life all occur during the continuance of 
the organic union, and doubtless because of it, 
and therefore afford no criterion of what a com- 
plete severance of that union would result in. 
Many of the most pronounced evolutionists 



MAN'S TOMORROW 65 

frankly declare that the position of the material- 
ists is untenable, that there is a spiritual world as 
well as a physical, and that between the two there 
is absolutely nothing in common. Prof. John Fiske 
remarks in his work on "The Unseen World," that 
"modern discovery, so far from bridging over the 
chasm between mind and matter, tends rather to 
exhibit the distinction between them as absolute. 
It has indeed been rendered highly probable that 
every act of consciousness is accompanied by a 
molecular motion in the cells and lobes of the 
brain. In a rough way we might thus say that 
the chemical energy of the food indirectly pro- 
duces the motion of these little nerve molecules. 
But does this motion produce a thought or state 
of consciousness? By no means. It simply pro- 
duces some other motion of nerve molecules, and 
this in turn produces motion of contraction or 
expansion in some muscle or becomes transformed 
into the chemical energy of some secreting gland. 
At no point in the whole circuit does a unit of 
motion disappear as motion to reappear as a unit 
of consciousness. The physical process is con- 
plete in itself and the thought does not enter into 
it. All that we can say is that the concurrence 
of the thought is simultaneous with that part of 
the physical process which consists of a molecular 
movement in the brain. To be sure, the thought 
is always there when summoned, but it stands out- 
side the dynamic circuit as something utterly aloof 
from and incomparable with the events which sum- 
mon it." 



66 MAN'S TOMORROW 

Prof. Tyndall, in his "Fragments of Science," 
says that "the passage from the physics of the 
brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness 
is unthinkable. Grant that thought and a definite 
molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, 
we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor ap- 
parently any rudiment of the organ which would 
enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from 
the one to the other. They appear together, but 
we do not know why." Spencer and Bain also 
coincide with this view. 

Professor Huxley, in accord with this, remarks, 
"I know nothing in the name of biology, and never 
hope to know anything, of the steps by which the 
passage from molecular movement to states of 
consciousness is effected" ; and also the late Pro- 
fessor Clifford, "The two things are on two utterly 
different platforms, the physical facts go along by 
themselves, and the psychical facts go along by 
themselves." 

Professor Fiske, in his work on "The Destiny 
of Man," in the opening of the sixteenth chapter, 
restates this as his position with added emphasis. 
The thought is expressed with such cogency and 
clearness and is of such prime importance that I 
will quote the entire passage: "It is not likely 
that we shall ever succeed in making the immortal- 
ity of the soul a matter of scientific demonstration, 
for we lack the requisite data. It must ever re- 
main an affair of religion rather than of science. 
The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us 



MAN'S TOMORROW 67 

when studied with the aid of molecular physics is 
against the materialist as far as it goes. It tells 
us that during the present life, although thought 
and feeling are always manifested in connection 
with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possi- 
bility can thought and feeling be in any sense the 
products of matter. Nothing could be more 
grossly unscientific than the famous remark of 
Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the 
liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say 
that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on 
in the brain is an amazingly complex series of 
molecular movements with which thought and feel- 
ing are in some unknown way correlated, not as 
effects or as causes, but as concomitants. So much 
is clear, but cerebral physiology says nothing 
about another life. Indeed, why should it? The 
last place in the world to which I should go for 
information about a state of things in which 
thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a 
cerebrum would be the cerebral physiology. The 
materialistic assumption that there is no such 
state of things, and that the life of the soul accord- 
ingly ends with the life of the body, is, perhaps, 
the most colossal instance of baseless assumption 
that is known to the history of philosophy." 

I think there is abundant evidence in the phe- 
nomena of mental life below the human to show 
that animal instinct, whose sole mission it is to 
help in the maintenance of animal life, is an im- 
pulse implanted in the organism itself to be fol- 



68 MAN'S TOMORROW 

lowed blindly through the action of the automatic 
nerve-arcs. The knowledge it displays is unmis- 
takably divine, the matchless thinking having been 
done when the organism was at the first devised. 
But coupled with this purely animal instinct, sup- 
plementing its action and supplying its defects, 
there are certain low forms of will-power and con- 
sciousness, of memory, reasoning, and imagina- 
tion, although the entire purpose of these seems 
to be to conserve the body merely, there being no 
apparent promptings to progress, no unsatisfied 
longings, the whole mental horizon shutting down 
close about the now and the near. 

While there are thus at least indications even 
among the lower animals of the existence of three 
distinct forms of force, the bioplastic, the instinc- 
tive, and the semi-rational, one above the other, 
and all above the inorganic, having for their mis- 
sion to build up and maintain the physical or- 
ganism, and while they clearly do not result from 
nor constitute any part of that organism, but 
rather are its creators and preservers, although 
not shown to have an existence antecedent to, or 
apart from, the transparent bit of protoplasm in 
and through which the bioplastic groups work 
their wonders, yet we have no positive evidence 
that they survive their marvelous handiwork. In- 
deed, as its destruction seems to terminate their 
only known mission, and as they evince no pur- 
pose and betray no longing beyond, there is no 
reason in themselves considered for thinking that 



MAN'S TOMORROW 69 

they outlive it. Agassiz has, it is true, most sug- 
gestively remarked in his essay on Classification 
that "a future life in which man should be de- 
prived of that great source of enjoyment and in- 
tellectual and moral improvement which result 
from the contemplation of the harmonies of an or- 
ganized world would involve a lamentable loss," 
and has raised the question whether "we may not 
look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds 
and all their inhabitants in presence of their Cre- 
ator as the highest conception of paradise." We 
might reply that should such an environment be 
found essential to the highest happiness of glori- 
fied spirits, God would simply have to perpetuate 
the same orders of existences which he has already 
begun, the same procession of life, the same laws 
of birth and growth and decay, the same panto- 
mimic battlings for mastery which now so call out 
all the infinite resources of instinctive promptings, 
that the same individuals need not return to earth 
again and again, playing the selfsame parts in an 
endless go-round which evidently would be their 
fate, no elements of progress having ever yet been 
found in them, inasmuch as the same ends of hu- 
man use would by simply continuing the present 
system be equally well conserved. 

Thus we see, in following out the various lines 
of modern research, that science comes very near 
the positive proof of immortality which we so pas- 
sionately long for, but the much-coveted prize 
ever lies just beyond its reach. Across its path 



70 MAN'S TOMORROW 

there seems to appear from out the darkness the 
uplifted hand of a Divine Providence, and out of 
the silence to break the whispered words of warn- 
ing, "Thus far, but no farther." 

Joseph Cook says that "the externality and in- 
dependence of the soul in relation to the body are 
known now under the microscope and scalpel bet- 
ter than ever before." In this remark there is an 
apparent lack of careful discrimination, for the 
body, as usually conceived of, is made up of un- 
used nutrients, protoplasm and formed material. 
Of the relation between the soul and the trans- 
parent jelly like protoplasm, which constitutes, 
as I have heretofore remarked two-thirds of this 
mass, the microscope and the scalpel have thus far 
proved powerless to offer any adequate explana- 
tion, and consequently we as yet have no positive 
knowledge as to whether the soul can survive its 
complete severance from all its present known 
linkings with matter. We have indeed been able 
to prove, as I have attempted to show, that it has 
a far wider liberty and range of action and a far 
greater mastery over matter and the under 
forces ; that it has a longer outreach of direct 
will-power, of personal impressment, of mysteri- 
ous spiritual telephonic touch, than we had ever 
dreamed of; that it has other and subtler sense- 
perceptions than those derived from the usual 
sense-organs, suggesting the possible possession 
of a second body too ethereal to be seen and, it 
may be, too ethereal to be destroyed by the chemic 



MAN'S TOMORROW 71 

forces that lie in wait to pluck down what the vital 
seek to build up and maintain; but, notwithstand- 
ing all this, we are obliged at the last to confess 
that we have no positve knowledge of the existence 
of the soul only as it continues to be in some way 
organically linked with tangible matter, to be a 
veritable prisoner, though its chain may stretch 
out over a continent or a sea, to be a prisoner 
still, though, like the soaring yet earth-bound 
eagle, it has an almost tireless power of pinion to 
speed toward the sun. 

But though science thus far has not been able 
to furnish us any positive knowledge of a life be- 
yond, yet these same startling facts which I have 
enumerated of the soul's completer mastery over 
matter and force, its farther outreach of direct 
will-power, of telephonic touch, its subtler sense- 
perceptions, and its ampler and intenser thinking 
power securing unwonted vividness of mental vis- 
ion — all intimating that we have entered only in 
part upon our contemplated inheritance of per- 
manent supremacy — form a chain of indirect evi- 
dences well-nigh as strong as direct, demonstra- 
tive proof. They are most welcome prophetic 
voices whispering their cheer through the inmost 
chambers of the soul. 

Science has also by its discoveries so vastly 
exalted our conceptions of man's place in Nature, 
and so unfolded the plan of creation, so clearly 
traced the trend of God's thought through the al- 
most illimitable periods of the past, that the same 



72 MAN'S TOMORROW 

conclusion breaks in upon us again and again 
with overwhelming force as the very highest of 
moral probabilities that to man must have been 
intrusted the priceless gift of immortality. There 
is no other adequate explanation of the discoveries 
which science has made of God's vast creative 
work. This method of propounding hypotheses 
to explain certain phenomena and adopting that 
one which best answers the conditions, which best 
explains the facts, is the true and universally ac- 
cepted method of reaching conclusions in all de- 
partments of scientific research. It has led to 
brilliant discoveries. Out of it have come all the 
theories upon which scientists have agreed to rest 
their faith. Leverrier, the celebrated French as- 
tronomer, reasoned that certain perturbations 
among the stars could be explained only by sup- 
posing a planet of a given magnitude and position 
hidden away in the far depths, and so confident 
did he become that he finally announced that if 
observers would turn their telescopes as he di- 
rected they would find a new world, and sure 
enough there shone Neptune, a hitherto unseen 
satellite of the sun. Many important theories 
have no such ocular proofs, yet science rests in 
full faith upon them. The undulatory theory of 
light, involving a belief in the prevalence of a lu- 
miniferous ether which even the most powerful 
microscope fails to reveal and which seemingly 
possesses properties otherwise unknown to matter, 
has won credence because it, in like manner, of- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 73 

fers the most reasonable solution of a certain 
group of phenomena. All working hypotheses 
thus originate and thus finally take their places 
among the accepted conclusions of science. 

As I have in my discussion of "Was Christ 
Divine," endeavored to show that only on the sup- 
position that there is a life beyond can we ade- 
quately explain the life that now is, I will here but 
briefly allude to the line of argument I there fol- 
low. Along down the ages there has been unfold- 
ing one vast all-embracing plan of thought. The 
evolution has gone on century after century, 
steadily, irresistibly, ceaseless, without hurry, 
without delay. Its beginning is so far back that 
we can not even conceive it by our utmost reach 
of imagination. The wealth of invention and vo- 
lition expended upon it and involved in it is also 
to us essentially infinite. The progress has been 
from the simple to the complex, from an amor- 
phic vapor bank to a peopled world. At the out- 
set matter lay dead in space, without form or 
motion or force, an absolute, universal chaos of 
unindividualized atoms. Unseen forces, grouped 
by deeply contrived correlations, having from 
time to time entered in as the plan progressed, 
there have ensued motion, order, organization, 
and, at last, multitudinous life. Science has 
shown beyond question that the creation of man 
was purposed by God to be the goal of all his 
creative thought on this planet. The entire phy- 
sical world was fitted up for man's environment. 



74 MAN'S TOMORROW 

The drift of the unfolding of this world-embrac- 
ing scheme had been toward man as the grand 
consummation. No creative purpose, no voice of 
prophecy in Nature, but has found embodiment 
and expression in him. No created thing but has 
conduced to the comfort and culture of him. No 
working force but has been mastered and made 
serviceable to him. No grace of form, of color, 
or of fragrance, but has sent thrills of apprecia- 
tive delight through him. He is the one cosmop- 
olite, the subcreator, microcosm, masterful 
spirit, without a rival in all this wide realm. But 
the fact of deepest significance is that all this en- 
vironment of the human soul, this plan of slow 
and steady growth from germs through struggle 
which took such countless centuries and such in- 
finitude of contriving to perfect, evidently had for 
its ultimate purpose the schooling of the moral at- 
tributes of that soul. Present happiness has ever 
been held in rigid subordination, indeed, has been 
ruthlessly sacrificed whenever the discipline de- 
ducible from bodily or mental pain, from poverty, 
bereavement, danger, or deeply felt loss, was 
needed to bring out the latent virtues of that soul. 
Perhaps it may help to deepen our conviction 
that the development of virtue was the prime and 
ultimate aim of all this infinite contriving, and it 
also may disclose to us more convincingly God's 
conception of the matchless worth of the soul if we 
somewhat particularize the means that were orig- 
inated and persistently employed to this end. 



MAN'S TOMORROW 75 

The plan of growth through struggle has been 
found to pervade all the great kingdoms of life 
on this planet, so intimately interlinked are they 
one with another. When the sun's heat reaches 
the buried seed there at once ensues a struggling 
of opposing forces, the germ, forcing moisture 
from the soil against inertia and gravity, separat- 
ing elements chemically knit together, grouping 
them into new combinations, bursting their coffin- 
lids and crowding up their heads for breath. 
Every leaf is a field of conflict, decomposing and 
assimilating gases and liquids. Trees battle with 
the winds, and, that they may not be worsted, 
strike their roots still deeper and bind their sin- 
ews in stronger cohesion. Thus plants struggle 
through every period of their growth. When 
they cease their contendings they breathe out their 
lives. In converting vegetable into animal tissue 
there appear the same phenomena of destroying 
old and forming new chemical compounds that 
exist in the growth of flower and leaf. Animal 
as well as vegetable life enters through infancy 
and weakness and reaches maturity only through 
struggle. This fierce chemical conflict that cease- 
lessly goes on while dead matter is thus being de- 
veloped into plants and plants into muscle, is but 
preparatory to a fiercer one, that of animal with 
animal, developing tribal characteristics among 
the brutes. Rarely is one born from mote to 
mammoth but comes battle proof at birth and 
gifted with instincts for fight. A microscope will 



76 MAN'S TOMORROW 

reveal a contest going on among the million oc- 
cupants of a drop of vinegar. The fish for de- 
fence have coats of mail; for attack, weapons of 
bone. The ants of Africa marshal their lilliputian 
forces with Napoleonic skill and endure with for- 
titude worthy of Greek antagonists. From chaos 
until now, between bill and spur, claw and tear- 
ing tooth, heel and horn, sting and tightening 
coil has this universal war been waging. From 
now until the world burns will it continue to wage. 
God armed the warriors, meant the fighting, 
planned the issue. 

Mind, like plant and animal, commences in the 
germ with no visible signs of power, and its devel- 
opment is effected by giving it to live in, act 
through and preserve a strange compound of ex- 
tremely perishable flesh and bone possessing im- 
pulses in direct antagonism to its own. The 
mind, forced to feed and clothe the body, is placed 
on an Earth for the most part either hopelessly 
deluged by water, piled into mountains, or spread 
out into long reaches of burning desert and bleak 
moor. Only a few small plats of ground are ca- 
pable of bearing fruit or are fit for habitation, 
while even these are governed by laws of repro- 
duction so hidden that only after an apparent 
waste of vast energy and material patient experi- 
ment at last discovers them. The metals are dis- 
tributed through swamp bogs, mingled with the 
shifting sands of rivers, or poured into the crev- 
ices of metamorphic rocks. Storms beat piti- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 77 

lessly about the body, frosts bite it, sunbeams 
search it, winds buffet it, yet the mind, thus com- 
pelled to shelter this foundling of flesh entrusted 
to its keeping, finds Nature tantalizingly giving 
building material in the rough, trees and quarries, 
without furnishing even a saw or an axe for the 
hands of industry. Forced to move about this 
cumbersome body, and soon tiring of its slow 
paces and searching for easier and swifter modes 
of travel it sees the wild horse without a rider but 
when it tries to mount him, "Catch me" he saucily 
whinnies and bounds away over the prairie. Dan- 
gers beset it on every hand, deserts puff simoons 
in its face, waves toss their mad caps over it, 
mountains belch flames at its coming or try to 
crush it with the avalanche. From this continual 
opposition to the mind's efforts to care for that 
over which it is placed guardian, the issue is, it 
becomes an Aladdin's lamp, and the elemental 
genii the slaves of the lamp. It touches forests 
and they melt ; it yokes steam-power to machinery 
and trains of carriages bear the freightage of na- 
tions through tunnelled mountains, and mon- 
strous sea-gulls of commerce flap their restless 
wings around the world. It looks through tele- 
scopic tubes and banks of nebulous mist are re- 
solved into universes of stars. It mounts electric 
steeds and swifter than light dashes along the 
telegraphic highways of modern life. 

These are but the beginnings of its trials and 
triumphs. Often after it has built its cities and 



78 MAN'S TOMORROW 

secured its comforts it finds them consumed by 
tongues of fire, poisoned with malaria or crushed 
under the tread of earthquakes. But out from 
this fierce strife come increased intellectual vigor, 
deeper knowledge of natural law and wider views 
of a ruling God. Its strivings with these outer 
forces are still but faintest echoes of those with 
the inner, in which the angels and devils of human 
nature are desperately battling for moral mas- 
tery. All the finer beauties in thought and feel- 
ing as well as the more imposing attributes of 
grandeur find origin in struggle. It is through 
watchings at the sick bed, tears and prayers for 
the erring, the fading of cherished hopes, that are 
developed life's rarest graces. Unrivaled for 
loveliness will ever be the smile of trust that lights 
the face of sorrow. 

As the chief source of grandeur in organic mat- 
ter is the display of power, seen in the violent 
commotions of the elements as earthquakes, vol- 
canoes, conflagrations, lightnings and tempests, 
and as among brutes the highest grandeur is 
found in their deadly contests where serpents 
strive with eagles, tigers with rhinoceri, where 
lionesses brave dangers, suffer fatigue or close in 
death-grapple in defence of their young; so 
with more marked emphasis human lives grow 
grand in dungeons, on racks and beds of torture, 
at the stake and amid thunderings of artillery, 
because there the greatest amount of spiritual 
force is concentrated and is in greatest activity. 



MAN'S TOMORROW 79 

Only through the mighty martyr-strugglings of 
the world's benefactors does the Creator's image 
become manifest in his creatures. 

From times of fable until now freedom has had 
her votaries. Neither arctic cold which fetters 
seas in frost, nor the enervating influence of 
tropical heat can still the heart's throbbings for 
freedom. This instinctive aspiration may be 
found even among the savage tribes of men. It 
is the very last of the nobler promptings that die 
out in the soul. The war-cry of antagonistic pas- 
sions has sounded since the first transgression, and 
under their opposing banners have rallied millions 
in every age. Their contests widen from individ- 
ual breasts to fields where battalions decide the 
destinies of empires. But this fierce contest, thus 
inseparable from liberty's life, is indispensable to 
its growth, gifts it with immortal youth and un- 
veils the splendor of its ideal. It is the struggle 
that follows sunlight on the soul, quickening into 
verdure the germs lying latent within it. Earth 
is sown thick with battlefields. Indeed where is 
the country that has not had its age of heroes, 
days of aspiration, tokens of promise, whose soil 
has not been made sacred by the blood of its sons ? 

The Creator in order that moral worth might 
be developed in his creatures was necessitated to 
expose their innocency to the possibility of taint. 
They must be held amenable to fixed codes of 
law and at the same time be endowed with perfect 
freedom of choice. Strength must come through 



80 MAN'S TOMORROW 

struggle; liberty be twin born with power to en- 
chain. A Tree of Probation must be planted in 
the Garden of Delights. Had Jehovah never suf- 
fered Satan to hold intercourse with mankind, or 
had he by his visible presence over awed alike the 
tempter and the tempted, had he at once and for- 
ever torn away every mask of deceit and un- 
earthed evil from every hiding place, rendered im- 
possible all attempts at sophistry by placing his 
intelligences so perfectly en rapport with each 
other that the inmost recesses of the mind, emo- 
tions and motives in their very incipiency, should 
lie exposed to every eye, as we now see he could 
readily have done, sin and suffering would never 
have found lodgment in the soul. But humanity 
thus rendered safe, would have been left hopelessly 
ignoble, occupying the low plane of brute life 
without prospect of progress or vestige of roy- 
alty. The danger was immanent but indispen- 
sable, for man never could have become God-like 
had it not been possible for him to degenerate 
into a fiend. The permitted temptation came, 
man fell, and behind him, exiled and disconsolate, 
commissioned cherubim closed the gates of his lost 
Eden, and the flaming sword of Providence 
guarded the unplucked fruit of the Tree of Life. 
Since then galling manacles of guilt have fettered 
limb and thought. Mastery over these inner 
usurping forces, freedom from prejudices, inor- 
dinate appetites and passions, disorganizing 
thoughts that corrode within, can never be secured 



MAN'S TOMORROW 81 

except through the most persistent struggle. 
Yet this fierce battle with self, thus universal as 
the race, from which neither class nor age is ex- 
empt, rarely a waking hour, a battle fought often 
at fearful odds, often terminating in irremedi- 
able disaster, furnishes many signal instances of 
the overthrow of evil, and the enthronement in the 
soul of the attributes of the true and the good. 

Thus all of men's mental and moral greatness 
has had a beginning far back in undeveloped 
germs, and finally has reached perfection only by 
means of long processes of growth through unre- 
mittent struggle. Thus we can readily see that 
it was God's prime purpose in this universal 
scheme of evolution reaching back through untold 
centuries and involving infinite patience and pro- 
fundity of thought to develop in human souls 
those moral attributes that should finally lift them 
into worthy companionship with himself. Every- 
thing was unquestionably sacrificed to that end. 
Nothing was counted too precious to pay the 
price. All the many prizes of this present life, 
health, ease, power, riches, preferments, the ten- 
derest social ties, the most alluring intellectual 
triumphs, life itself, all have been freely sacrificed 
that this end may be attained. This has been the 
one prime, priceless goal of all endeavor. Every 
other achievement has been counted but incidental 
and temporary, designed simply to subserve this 
supreme purpose. 

The most brilliant geniuses have been heavily 



82 MAN'S TOMORROW 

handicapped by enfeebled bodies, by pinching 
poverty, by race restrictions, by political servi- 
tude, and their most promising plans have been 
cut short by inexorable death. Moral discipline 
has been set over against every form of present 
earthly prize and pleasure. More than all this, 
God has deliberately chosen to take the risk of 
this entire vast scheme failing utterly at the last 
rather than not make the effort to win so rich a 
prize, for, as we have pointed out, everything 
from the very necessities of the case has had to 
be placed in jeopardy. God evidently had longed 
for sympathetic companionship. We can explain 
his nature and his course on no other hypothesis. 
We cannot account in any other way for the ori- 
gin of our own social instinctive longings. Think 
you that he, after placing such an estimate on 
the intrinsic worth of souls, and with his con- 
fessed intense desire to enter into intimate union 
with them, would sit with folded hands and folded 
heart and see them perish utterly; that he would 
watch them come and go like flitting phantasms 
of a dream, knowing certainly, as scientists unani- 
mously affirm, that all physical life on this planet 
must ultimately come to an end, and darkness and 
silence ensue? Should he make any other attempt 
to secure permanent satisfying companionship he 
would be compelled to plan like stages of evolu- 
tion and incur like risks. He certainly has the 
power to prolong this present human life, to make 
death but the portal to a life beyond if he chooses, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 83 

and there is no conceivable reason why he should 
not and every reason why he should. In the pres- 
ence of these disclosures can we believe that death 
ends all, that human spirits upon whose birth and 
unfolding there have been expended such endless 
eons of time, such inconceivable riches of thought, 
would be suffered to drop out of their present 
self-conscious state of being just as they with 
most glorious possibilities had barely come into it, 
for the vast majority of our race die when at the 
very beginning of their development, the most 
mature having to the very last a deep sense of 
their incompleteness and an insatiable longing for 
a more perfect attainment and an inborn hope of 
another and a larger life beyond. Would a God 
who has shown such resources of power, such 
depth of love, have his final purpose perish right 
on the very threshold of its achievement? 

Modern science, when it made this its notable 
discovery not only of a world-embracing but a 
universe-embracing law of evolution, established, 
as I conceive, beyond all reach of reasonable con- 
troversy, the fact of an after-life. We need but 
to analyze and logically arrange the truths 
wrapped up in this, the grandest synthesis of sci- 
ence, to realize what an immovable rock science 
had unwittingly uncovered for us on which to 
build our hopes of immortality. When the world's 
savants demonstrated the fact of there being pro- 
gressively incarnated through the long roll of the 
ages an orderly and predetermined plan of 



84 MAN'S TOMORROW 

thought they at the same time and necessarily 
demonstrated the existence behind it all of an in- 
telligent designing mind and a dominant execut- 
ing will originating and directing its vast unfold- 
ing; and they further demonstrated that there 
was some culminating purpose, some crowning 
consummation, designed finally to be realized as 
an embodiment of some cherished ideal; and they 
even still further demonstrated that this ideal 
could be nothing less than a living spirit partak- 
ing of the divine nature and capable at the last 
of entering into the divine companionship. There 
is no question but that such a height of purpose 
and of power is within the reach of the creating 
God; and that with the ushering in of such a 
spirit, a spirit of illimitable possibilities of intel- 
lectual and moral growth, the series of creative 
acts would be complete, the utmost limit of the 
divine purpose and power would be attained, and 
the infinite yearning of the divine heart satisfied. 
Has the human spirit evinced such possibilities? 
Are there wrapped up in it germinal capacities 
for such companionship? Have disciplinary and 
developing influences been set at work to bring 
into glorious fulfillment these indwelling prophe- 
cies of the soul? Or is man to be succeeded by 
some still higher intelligence destined to round 
out into full and final perfectness this vast cycle 
of God's creative plan? There is every reason 
to believe that there are already other mighty 
companies of God's children peopling the planets 



MAN'S TOMORROW 85 

that circle round our own or other suns, but have 
we any grounds for suspecting that they occupy 
or can occupy, any higher plane of being than it 
is possible for us to reach, that they can come into 
any closer relationship with the divine heart? Or 
rather is it not our privilege to believe that we 
may, if we will, stand as peers, even among the 
archangelic hosts in the great ingathering, by and 
by, of the gifted and the good? 

If there are now no created intelligences that 
radically outrank us, and if there can not possibly 
be any ; if with us, and such as us, God's creative 
work is made complete — then science in its dis- 
covery of a universe-embracing plan of evolution 
brought to light with it that far more precious 
fact of God's gift to man of immortality. We 
need but to get a clear conception of the nature 
of the elements that must necessarily enter into 
that living spirit which fulfills the divine ideal, 
and of the nature of the environment of develop- 
ing forces necessarily set at work upon it, to see 
how it must contain within itself both the promise 
and the power of an endless life. This conclusion 
we shall find will impress itself upon us as abso- 
lutely axiomatic. In order for this spirit to have 
the stamp of divine completeness it must, in the 
first place, come into closest vital union with Na- 
ture and with all that Nature comprises, and 
through its knowledge of divine law and its obedi- 
ence to it must master Nature's forces, every one, 
and make them serviceable to its sovereign will. 



86 MAN'S TOMORROW 

Has not man been brought into just such vital 
union, and is he not fast entering upon such uni- 
versal dominion? He is pushing his way out into 
new fields, making new discoveries, acquiring new 
powers every day, thus broadening the boundaries 
of his kingdom continually, yet with all his won- 
derful conquests he has not yet been able to say, 
"I have power to lay down my life and I have 
power to take it again." He has indeed made 
most marked advancement in his knowledge and 
treatment of diseases. He has increased his 
power to direct for a season and utilize the vari- 
ous organizing forces of vegetable and animal 
vitality and to prolong their active indwelling in 
the frail bodies which they have built, but, despite 
his utmost endeavors, he finds himself utterly 
powerless to prevent their going out at the last 
and abandoning forever all that they have so mar- 
velously wrought, to be ruthlessly torn down by 
hordes of disintegrating forces into dull dust 
again. Of one, and only one, out of all of earth's 
countless multitudes has it ever been said that he 
claimed such sovereignty. It is recorded of him 
that he not merely claimed it but made good his 
claim, and that after his resurrection he showed 
to his disciples how that simply through a more 
perfect vitalization the body once sown in weak- 
ness should be raised in power, sown a natural 
body should be raised a spiritual body, never to 
feel pain or to taste death any more. Whether 
he ever made such claim or ever made that claim 



MAN'S TOMORROW 87 

good we need not now inquire, but if man is the 
crown of creation, and if Christ was man per- 
fected, he certainly ought to have had such sov- 
ereignty or there would be heights of privilege 
and of power still beyond his reach. He needed to 
taste death in order that the disciplinary and de- 
veloping processes in him might be completed and 
God's full thought realized. The same sov- 
ereignty he possessed he ought also to vouchsafe 
his disciples, that eventually in him all would be 
made alive, that when they, through his trans- 
forming influence, had become, like him, com- 
plete in glad obedience and in loving purpose, had 
been tested and developed on every side and in 
every way proved worthy, they would enter with 
him into the full possession of their inheritance of 
universal sovereignty under God. 

If we find that man has indeed been so royally 
endowed in every other respect, that he has in him 
such transcendent intellectual and moral possi- 
bilities that he needs but to have continued exist- 
ence, a fitting environment, and a love-born pur- 
pose to prove himself to be that veritable divine 
ideal which scientists assure us is the long-pur- 
posed culmination of all these mighty evolutionary 
movements with which this whole vast universe 
is still astir, we can not but conclude that most 
ample opportunity for the possible intellectual 
and spiritual unfolding has already been provided 
for in the loving decrees of God, and that what 
we call death is only the soul's transition into an- 



88 MAN'S TOMORROW 

other and doubtless a more fitting environment of 
developing agencies in the long process of char- 
acter-building through which it necessarily must 
pass before that large masterful liberty born of 
sovereign love is realized, before the full glory of 
that long-awaited divine likeness is finally at- 
tained. This is a necessary logical sequence, for 
whether man is to be the last of the created series 
or not, God cannot avoid affording to some one 
the same ample opportunity for character-build- 
ing if he accomplishes his ultimate purpose, and 
therefore we have no conceivable reason for think- 
ing that he would suffer man to be ruthlessly 
brushed aside after a few brief years of troubled 
life to make room for another, provided we can 
find in him convincing evidences of the existence 
of veritable living germs of divine likeness. That 
living spirit of which we have spoken which is to 
be the full and final embodiment of God's ideal 
must not only be in vital union with Nature, and 
be at last master of it, but also endowed with such 
intellectual capacities, such powers of insight, such 
insatiable thirst for knowledge, such taste and 
mental bent, that it will enter appreciatively and 
with keenest zest into the very thought-life of God 
as it finds it incorporated in this restless, ever- 
changing universe of worlds. Are not these un- 
questionably the gifts of man? His inventions in 
the arts abound in ingenious appliances precisely 
analogous to those found out afterward to be in- 
wrought into the bodily equipments of earth's in- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 89 

stinct- guided creatures, his multiform industries 
and implements having their counterparts in the 
diversified labors of insects and brutes, in their 
tool-terminating limbs and faces, his differently 
organized communities, his monarchical and demo- 
cratic forms of government, his disciplined 
armies, his weapons and fortifications, being 
matched by like social organizations and like con- 
trivances among these same voiceless multitudes. 
These striking resemblances are not the results 
of any conscious or unconscious imitation by man 
or the following out of any suggestive hints he 
may have discovered in Nature, but it was after 
he had responded to the promptings of his own 
innate individuality, had pursued independent 
lines of thought, that he discovered what a re- 
markable likeness his ideas bore to those in both 
animate and inanimate Nature. He has also 
proved himself competent to enter more compre- 
hensively every year into this divine thought-life, 
pushing his way through into the profoundest 
"penetralia with his chemical analyses, his micro- 
scopes and telescopes and spectroscopes and 
odoroscopes, his tasimeters and microphones, and 
all those ingeniously contrived search-lights of 
modern science, and he has been enabled to prove 
the accuracy of his insight by comparing his or- 
der of classifications with the order of historical 
development discovered long afterward in turning 
the leaves of the rock records of earth's deeply 
buried past. Kepler, the distinguished astron- 



90 MAN'S TOMORROW 

omer, as one of his grand discoveries flashed upon 
him, knelt in profound thanksgiving and heart- 
felt awe at the realization that he had been actu- 
ally rethinking the thoughts of God. Man, also, 
has been able to catch the conceptions of the Cre- 
ator, even when only partially expressed, and 
carry out plans which God had just begun, acting 
as an intelligent sub-creator, multiplying and im- 
proving the varieties of vegetable and animal life, 
adding new riches of use and new graces of form 
and of fragrance as God apparently had pur- 
posed at the first. 

And man is not content with his present 
achievements, but is adding conquest to conquest 
with increasing knowledge and ever-multiplying 
resources of power. There is a tireless and a 
dauntless energy carrying him onward, an enthu- 
siasm of investigation that leads him to endure 
every manner of privation and fatigue, to under- 
go every exposure to danger, to sacrifice every 
lower interest of life, so intent is he in his long- 
ings to enter into this divine thought-life of the 
universe. 

In the third place, this living spirit, in order to 
be the very climax of creative purpose, must be 
gifted with moral discernment, absolute freedom 
of choice, and capacity for self-forgetting love, 
and must realize, and prove worthy of, the fear- 
ful responsibilities that inevitably accompany 
such bestowal, a bestowal that virtually intrusts 
to the far-reaching sovereignty of its will the very 



MAN'S TOMORROW 91 

arbitrament of its own moral destiny. This is 
the loftiest pinnacle of privilege or of power to 
which in the very nature of the case any created 
intelligence can ever be raised. This is the rich- 
est gift that can ever be bestowed, for it is the 
gift in embryo of the very attributes of God him- 
self. Have we reason for believing that man is 
such a living spirit? that in moral endowment and 
in possibility of moral attainment he has been so 
exalted in the scale of being? The Scriptures 
have indeed declared that God made man in his 
own likeness, but is this borne out by the concep- 
tion of man's higher nature arrived at through 
scientific investigations of the facts of individual 
and national history? After a most exhaustive 
critical research there is now no longer any dis- 
pute among scholars as to the fact of a historic 
Christ, neither is there as to the sweetness and 
light of an utterly self-forgetting love that per- 
vades every work and purpose of his life. Nine- 
teen centuries have searched him through and 
through, and no fault has ever been found in him. 
Renan, that most brilliant French skeptic, who for 
years made his life and sayings a most thoughtful 
study from his standpoint, has penned this re- 
markably frank confession: "The highest con- 
sciousness of God that ever existed in the breast 
of humanity was that of Jesus." 

Christ has enriched and ennobled the thought of 
every age since his advent, and among the most 
civilized peoples of to-day he is still in the very 



92 MAN'S TOMORROW 

forefront in all ethical and religious thought. By 
the power of his personal sympathy he has, 
through that most marvelous law of spiritual as- 
similation, so transformed men into friends and 
followers, so won their confidence and kindled in 
them such a flame of enthusiastic devotion, that 
they have gladly sacrificed every comfort, every 
prospect of personal preferment, endured every 
extreme of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, forsaken 
home and country, submitted to tortures and im- 
prisonments, braved the most threatening dan- 
gers, faced death itself with songs and thanksgiv- 
ings, have proven in every conceivable way with 
what stanch loyalty men will follow a loved leader, 
what unfolding and uplifting power love has over 
the human heart, what capacity for love the heart 
has ; how grandly possible it is for love so to per- 
meate it with its transfiguring light, so to enlarge 
its powers, exalt its impulses and passionate long- 
ings, as to disclose unmistakably the lineaments 
of its divine likeness and prophesy of its ultimate 
fitness for divine companionship. The Scriptures 
assert for Christ that he brought life and immor- 
tality to light, and it is generally thought that 
this was done solely through his direct declara- 
tions and his own rising from the dead. This, of 
course, is proof sufficient for the Christian be- 
liever, but to the scientist and philosopher, who 
regard Christ simply as a man, these evidences are 
wholly inconclusive ; but even they may find in the 
life of Christ, in its spotless purity, in its un- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 93 

broken series of victories over all promptings to 
selfishness, in Christ's catholicity of love, his rev- 
elation of the infinite passion of the human heart 
for friendly sympathy, its infinite capacity to be 
uplifted by it through the law of spiritual assim- 
ilation, in Christ's recognition of this nascent di- 
vinity in every man and in his own manifest 
power to quicken it into growing life; in short, in 
his declaration and demonstration of the possibil- 
ity of the human soul to develop into ever stronger 
likeness, and enter into ever closer union, with 
the great Oversoul that gave it birth, — in these 
and other distinguishing characteristics of his 
life the scientist and the philosopher may find, as 
I most profoundly believe, comforting and con- 
vincing proofs of man's immortality. There is 
no other solution of Christ's grand and simple 
life of love and trust from either a scientific or a 
philosophic standpoint. No nobler, more majes- 
tic being can be imagined; none with a larger 
freedom of choice, a deeper moral discernment, a 
firmer adhesion to principle, a more self-forget- 
ting intensity of love. Even if he were mere man, 
still we can say, with all due reverence, that in his 
creation God exhausted his infinite resources, for 
he evidently gifted him with the very germs of in- 
finity, in the possibilities of spiritual perfection 
and of divine likeness, and in order to disclose 
that likeness and to call out that matchless love, 
to unfold that flawless character, he had to make 
life a perpetual battle-test, a prolonged sacrifice; 



94 MAN'S TOMORROW 

he had to provide an environment of weaknesses 
and cares, of dangers and disappointments, of 
difficulties and trials without number. He had 
also to awaken longings and kindle hopes of im- 
mortality through certain constitutional, ineradi- 
cable intuitions of the soul. These are God's 
pledges, his authorized voices of prophecy. Has 
he made pledges, think you, which he can not or 
will not fulfill? Has he filled man with delusive 
aspirations for some impossible ideal, with a hope- 
less hungering for a more perfect attainment; 
has he condemned him to pursue without respite, 
and without reward some chimera of the brain, to 
be deceived and led astray by some will o' the 
wisp; has he doomed him to go down at last to 
an eternal death with his burning thirst for the 
infinite still unassuaged? "If the Supreme Being 
loves goodness, man's manifest capacity for it 
must lay hold of his conserving power." And so 
it would seem that as long as there is the least 
possibility of developing even the lowest, the least 
gifted, so long will life be prolonged or renewed 
and an unremittent effort put forth for their re- 
claim. 

How else, in view of the fact that the vast cos- 
mic process, though already reaching through 
long eons, has evidently, up to the close of this 
present life, been left noticeably incomplete, can 
God's ways to man be justified than by presup- 
posing a longer outreach and opportunity in a 
life beyond? 



MAN'S TOMORROW 95 

We cannot without intellectual confusion at- 
tribute irrationality to the noblest instincts of our 
nature. Had God designed man as the sport of 
vain and barren hopes and aspirations he would 
have unworthily created something to no purpose. 
The infinite capabilities of the human mind, we 
well know, are but very partially developed in 
this life. Each new growth in knowledge, in 
spiritual insight, in power of will, in love for the 
beautiful and the true, serves simply as a starting 
point for a larger growth in the same or in other 
departments of thought and feeling. It would be 
contrary to the course of Nature, to the generally 
accepted perfection of the Divine character, to 
endow a being with capacities destined to remain 
forever but partially developed. The fact that 
material things perfect their ideals here and now, 
while the higher immaterial fail to realize theirs 
may safely be interpreted as a foretoken of im- 
mortality. Has God permitted voices of proph- 
ecy to echo through the soul which he has de- 
signed should mislead in order that he might de- 
velop in man a nobleness, a loving trust, a moral 
stability, a grandeur of purpose greater than his 
own? Has he lowered his own moral standard 
to lift up man's? What could be his possible mo- 
tive to thus commit moral suicide? Or rather, 
how could such a purpose ever enter the divine 
mind? This is absolutely unthinkable, yet with- 
out some such divinely inspired hope there could 
not come into the soul any divine life. Christ con- 



96 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tinually held out such hope, knowing full well he 
could not disciple men without it. Would God 
with imperturbable coolness suffer the self-re- 
nouncing Christ to be thus deceived, and thus also 
to deceive millions of others age after age and 
thereby induce them to jeopardize every earthly 
interest for the reward, after suffering and sacri- 
fice and struggle had done their terrible work, of 
blank annihilation? Would he awaken in his 
children this the noblest of all longings, one no 
earthly friendship can satisfy, to be brought into 
sympathetic intimacy with himself that they may 
feel the uplift of his personal presence, would he 
encourage them to cherish this, the tenderest, holi- 
est sentiment of the soul, and at the same time be 
harboring that most appalling purpose to banish 
them forever out of being? Would God so de- 
prive himself of all a father's joy in feeling the 
responsive heartbeats of grateful and confiding 
children? Would he thus consent to lose all the 
charms of social intercourse forever? Is this 
the God which scientific research has found en- 
throned behind phenomena? Such a one must be 
either heartless or helpless. To believe that death 
is the end-all of the universe would be to believe 
the universe a worse than failure, a bodying forth 
of rank injustice and deceit, that there is no glo- 
rious "far-off divine event toward which the whole 
creation moves," no vast world-process out of 
which there is to issue some day the fullest liberty 
through the fullest love, no survival of living 



MAN'S TOMORROW 97 

spirits fitted and destined for divine companion- 
ship, no God wanting love or worthy of it, but 
some mystery-shrouded being to be left at the last 
in that loneliest of isolations, a self-imposed exile 
from all of love's relationships, dwelling forever 
after amid the wreck of matter and the crush of 
worlds. 

Venturing to reiterate briefly, in order to give 
fitting emphasis to so vital a view, I affirm that 
when we conceive the vastness of the plan of evo- 
lution, the infinite power and resource and the 
matchless patience displayed, reaching back over 
unnumbered ages, the pronounced advances so far 
secured, the stupendous issues at stake, the pos- 
sible sublime goal of goodness as bodied forth in 
the life of Christ, the blood and tears and agony 
wrung from tortured souls, the heroic sacrifices 
endured, the complete self-effacement, when we 
catch glimpses of what inestimable results might 
be secured were a longer trial given, the question 
comes up with overwhelming force, what conceiv- 
able reason can there be for abandoning further 
effort? God's resources for rescuing struggling 
souls are certainly not exhausted, the prizes prof- 
fered are of priceless value, the means are appar- 
ently ample if persistently employed. Why 
should one brief human life end the test? If there 
is no life beyond, if there is to be no further ef- 
fort made, how can we but conclude that the whole 
scheme was conceived in most heartless fraud, and 
that it must end at last for the great God of the 



98 MAN'S TOMORROW 

universe in an eternal haunting memory, a fath- 
omless remorse, an inconceivably lonely isolation? 
Into such a horror of darkness does irref- 
ragable logic plunge our thought when once we 
deny man's immortality ; but the moment we grant 
it, what a blessed light, what a wondrous harmony 
breaks along the world! How clear it becomes 
why deep down in the restless human heart there 
exists that intense longing for permanency, that 
desire running through all its joy in the healthful 
changes which life brings that the life itself shall 
endure, that the work of life and the record of it 
shall remain, that its own power shall continue to 
be recognized and felt! why it searches so dili- 
gently, while embodying its concepts, for those 
materials, for that device of workmanship, and 
those combinations of form best suited to with- 
stand the stress of disintegrating forces ! why it 
aims not only to win but to hold the pleasure- 
yielding prizes of life, to mould circumstance, 
command destiny, and defy change ! why the 
statesman seeks to make some permanent impress 
on his country's polity, the scholar to leave be- 
hind some imperishable monument of his learn- 
ing, the scientist to link his name indissolubly with 
some notable contribution to human knowledge, 
the philosopher to found some growing school of 
thought, the poet to set singing forever some love 
or longing! why we seek so instinctively to paint 
our cherished ideals on the strongest canvas with 
the most permanent pigments, chisel them into 



MAN'S TOMORROW 99 

granite and marble, mould and harden them into 
brass and iron ! why in every imaginable way, ac- 
cording to our vocation and taste and environ- 
ment and personal power, we make it a lifelong 
study how to place that which we prize beyond 
all annihilating influences ! why the thought of 
ourselves or of our work passing away is so ut- 
terly repellent, the longing for perpetuity so 
deeply imbedded in the constitutional framework 
of our minds, being as universal as the race, be- 
coming more pronounced as the world becomes 
more civilized, involving our noblest loves, our 
loftiest aspirations, our brightest expectancies ! 

How clearly we can see pervading the mighty 
ongoings of Divine Providence a purpose of di- 
vine love the very instant we regard this life as a 
preliminary training school for a life beyond, the 
present sufferings and struggles, the rending of 
tender home ties, the defeat of fond ambitions, 
the dashing from parched lips of lifted cups of 
pleasure, all as indispensable prerequisites to 
character-building, to the securing and conserv- 
ing of our higher and more permanent interests, 
as the only disciplinary and developing agencies 
that are at all adequate to prepare for that 
larger and grander life awaiting us by and by! 
How cheerily the battle-scarred Paul speaks of 
this in his Corinthian letter, "For our light afflic- 
tion, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a 
far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory !" 

What masterful portraitures we meet with here 



100 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and there in Tennyson's "In Memoriam" of the 
doubts that distract us because of the turbulence 
and swift vicissitudes that mark human history 
and the restful assurances that come afterward, 
like blessed benedictions, as our faith takes hold 
on the promises of immortality that are sounding 
in our souls: 

' Are God and Nature then at strife 
That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life. 

So careful of the type? but no, 
From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, a thousand types are gone; 
I care for nothing; all shall go. 

O ! life as futile, then, as frail ! 
O ! for thy voice to soothe and bless ! 
What hope of answer or redress? 
Behind the veil, behind the veil. 



Thine are these orbes of light and shade ; 
Thou madest life in man and brute, 
Thou madest Death; and lo! Thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust, 
Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die, 
And Thou hast made him ; Thou art just. 



That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not a life shall be destroyed 



MAN'S TOMORROW 101 

Or cast as rubbish to the void 
When God has made the pile complete. 

That each who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall, 
Remerging in the general soul, 

Is faith as vague as all unsweet. 
Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside." 

With this clew in our hands man no longer ap- 
pears bunglingly made or the earth ill suited to 
him, or his constitutional instincts and intuitions 
raising, through some fell purpose, false and 
hurtful expectations, or the Creator with deliber- 
ate heartlessness breaking with him his most sol- 
emn word. With this clew we can reconcile with 
the supposed beneficence, wisdom, and power of 
God the fact that the tenderest ties of love and 
friendship have been made possible and been en- 
couraged within an environment of ever-threaten- 
ing dangers and of certain death; we can under- 
stand why man's affectionate nature has been 
filled with yearnings that this world's companion- 
ships utterly fail to satisfy, with outlooks that 
this world's experiences have never yet realized. 

With this clew we can satisfactorily account 
for the world's consensus of opinion in favor of 
immortality, that opinion being the more pro- 
nounced the more masterful and exalted the men- 
tal and spiritual gifts ; we can interpret the pre- 



102 MAN'S TOMORROW 

dominance of hope, the insatiable desire for life 
and creeping horror at thought of annihilation, 
the indefinable expectancy reaching out beyond 
the confines of time, that deep unrest, that in- 
tensest longing, that consciousness of yet but par- 
tially developed intellectual capacities and of spir- 
itual imperfections with which all the nobler souls 
are filled, the fact of the imagination's power to 
indefinitely widen the horizon of the actual and 
the present, the loosing of man from the thral- 
dom of blind instinct and the placing upon him 
the fearful responsibilities of sovereign will, the 
power of standing with unquailing heart face to 
face with death, the sublime willingness to sacri- 
fice for principle all the privileges of life, its 
brightest prospects, even life itself. 

With this clew we can with calm confidence and 
enlightened faith assure ourselves that "this uni- 
verse," as another has said, "is not an infinite con- 
trivance for the production and swift extinction 
of sentient, loving, intelligent life; it is not a stu- 
pendous vestibule to a charnel-house, where affec- 
tion, friendship, science, and art find congenial 
and progressive recipients for a few fleeting mo- 
ments, and man is admitted to a glimpse of a pos- 
sible happiness and growth and then plunged into 
blackness of annihilation; a world where life and 
mind are given only to be withdrawn, as if in 
mockery, and truth and goodness are as evanes- 
cent as falsehood and evil." With this clew we 
are no longer the victims of that terrible night- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 103 

mare of doom under which many of the ablest 
physicists of our age seem fast bound as by an 
evil spell, "of giant worlds concentrating out of 
nebulous vapor, developing with prodigious waste 
of energy into theatres of all that is grand and 
sacred in spiritual endeavor, clashing and explod- 
ing again into dead vapor balls, only to renew 
the same toilsome process without end — a sense- 
less bubble of Titan forces, with life, love, and 
aspiration brought forth only to be extin- 
guished" ; for with this clew we can see afar down 
the coming ages a glorious culmination of that 
vast plan of evolution which science has dis- 
covered reaching out to the uttermost bounds of 
the universe and back through the remotest 
periods of the past, awing us by the majestic 
sweep of its divine thought and the infinite depths 
of its divine love. 

It has been profoundly said that "immortality 
is the great prophecy of reason." Open-eyed sci- 
ence, if it stands by its uniform practice hitherto, 
must also accept this hypothesis of a life beyond, 
as it, and it alone, furnishes adequate explanation 
of the phenomena of the life that now is. 

Upon this presentation of the intimations and 
strong probabilities, amounting to almost positive 
proofs, of the fact of immortality as derived from 
scientific investigations and discoveries thus far 
made, we must for the present be content to rest 
our case. 



MAN'S TOMORROW 



III 



Thus far we have seen that science, while fur- 
nishing no positive knowledge of immortality, has 
certainly so established and emphasized the rea- 
sonableness of it as to confirm our hopes and 
transform them into feelings of blessed assurance. 
It also has helped us to wider and clearer con- 
ceptions of what that life will be. 

It has revealed the universal prevalence of a 
law of evolution from the simple to the complex ; a 
law of order, of gradation of forces, reaching 
from the atomic to the vital, from the first faintly 
spiritual to the divine; a law of harmony involv- 
ing the final and absolute mastery of every force 
over all below it and absolute submission of every 
force to all above. It has established that this 
harmony is the proposed goal of creation, and 
that any force that persistently impedes this prog- 
ress or breaks this harmony will ultimately and 
utterly destroy itself. Science by its investiga- 
tions also leads us to believe that matter and force 
are indissolubly joined, that we have no warrant 
for believing that our souls will ever exist with- 
out a body. No such divorcement is anywhere 
known. Though atomic forces have never been 
dislodged from their original hiding places, other 
physical forces have; but while changed in form 
they have never been destroyed or shorn of the 

104 



MAN'S TOMORROW 105 

least scintilla of their primal power, so scientists 
claim, a law having been discovered to prevail not 
only of correlation but of conservation so com- 
plete that they can be made to pass through a 
wide circuit of change and again to reappear in 
their first forms and first potency. The vital 
forces, however, not only can be dislodged from 
the bodies which they have organized and for a 
time reigned over, but dislodged beyond all reach 
of our recall. If they continue to exist — and, 
judging from the law of persistence prevailing 
among other forces, we have analogical reason 
to think they do — they must begin anew the work 
of vitalization unless the second body is already 
organized inside the first, for if souls survive we 
have no reason to doubt but that their gift of or- 
ganization will survive with them, and that they, 
the instant they leave the one body which they 
preceded and produced, will, if necessary, begin 
building another. But they, perhaps, will not be 
forced to use such gross material again or else 
will uplift and transform that material by a more 
perfect vitalization. It will not, however, seri- 
ously surprise us if it transpires that inside the 
present visible body another subtler one already 
exists, made, it may be, out of some such invisible 
incomprehensible form of matter as the all-per- 
vasive luminiferous ether, so seemingly undisin- 
tegrating and so ethereal as to be able to inter- 
penetrate all other substances, even the most com- 
pact. As you are doubtless aware, the undula- 



106 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tory theory of light — a theory as well established 
as that of gravitation itself — presupposes the ex- 
istence of an intermolecular and interstellar ether, 
which is not only all-pervasive and invisible, but 
possessing properties seemingly contradictory to 
those of ordinary matter. 

Newton in his "Principia" alludes to a most 
subtle spirit pervading and lying hid in all gross 
bodies, and in his description designates quite 
clearly and fully this very ether, although he ac- 
knowledges that there has not been found as yet 
any direct proof of its existence. Since his day 
his remarkable surmise has been conclusively es- 
tablished by proofs offered by Struve, Helmholtz, 
Lord Kelvin, Dolbear, Tesla, Rontgen, and other 
scientists. How astonishingly has this widened 
our conception of the properties of matter. 

It is through this ether that not only light and 
ordinary electric waves are propagated, but the 
X-rays and wireless telegraphy, heat and even 
gravitation are supposed to accomplish their mar- 
vels. Bodies made out of this form of matter 
could occupy the same space at the same time as 
our present grosser ones, move freely among 
them, be apparently exempt from disintegration, 
become visible or invisible as the indwelling spirit 
willed, be transported with inconceivable swift- 
ness, almost the swiftness of thought, be free from 
all the dangers that beset us now, because of being 
more completely vitalized, be endowed with in- 
comparably more acute sense perceptions, have in 



MAN'S TOMORROW 107 

every way greater receptive and revealing power. 
To our utter astonishment John Herschel es- 
timates that the pressure of this mysterious ether 
per square inch must be seventeen billion pounds. 
Prof. Jevons says that we may regard it as in- 
finitely solid adamant, and this view seems necessi- 
tated, for by means of its marvelous elasticity 
wave-motion is propagated through it at the in- 
conceivable rate of one hundred and ninety-two 
thousand miles per second, yet, to our utter as- 
tonishment and confusion of thought, the most 
ponderous worlds whirl about in it with seemingly 
so much ease that it is difficult for us to persuade 
ourselves that they are not whirling in a vacuum. 
This fits in strangely well with Paul's conceptions 
and with Christ's recorded transfiguration before 
his crucifixion and his reappearances afterward. 
"For we know that if our earthly house of this 
tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens." . . . "All flesh is not the same flesh, 
there is one flesh of men, another of beasts, an- 
other of birds, so there are celestial bodies and 
bodies terrestrial." . . . "So also is the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is 
raised in incorruption, ... it is sown a natural 
body, it is raised a spiritual body." . . . "And 
Jesus was transfigured before them, and his face 
did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white 
as the light." . . . "And it came to pass as he 
sat at meat with them he took bread and blessed 



108 MAN'S TOMORROW 

it and broke it and gave it to them and their 
eyes were opened and he vanished out of their 
sight." . . . "In the evening when the doors were 
shut for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood 
in the midst and showed them his hands and his 
side, and after eight days, the doors being shut 
he again appeared ... he took of the fish and 
the honey and did eat before them, and while he 
blessed them he was parted from them and carried 
up into heaven." 

From this it would seem that death is but a 
transition from one materially conditioned state 
into another. Note how both Christ's transfigura- 
tion and resurrection body was of so ethereal a 
texture and so completely under his vitalizing con- 
trol it responded promptly and absolutely to his 
every wish, instantly appearing or disappearing, 
of wraith-like texture, or becoming flesh-tinted 
and contoured and seemingly organized and 
clothed upon as of old, unobstructed by the most 
solid substances as it came and went with the 
speed of light, gravitation-free as it glided over 
the foam-capped crests of the sea, or disappeared 
at last behind the cloud-curtains of the sky. We 
know of nothing to hinder this ether becoming 
organized and rendered serviceable as a subtle 
second enswathment of the soul. Such execution 
of a double purpose, instead of being unknown to 
nature, is indeed so common that we have failed 
to catch its full significance. This is constantly 
taking place in vegetable and insect life. The 



MAN'S TOMORROW 109 

germinal force inside the apple seed makes no 
disclosure for years of its ulterior design. It 
works steadily through many growing seasons, 
fashioning bole and branch and leaf as if no other 
commission were given to it. The architectural 
skill displayed as it arranges so accurately the 
elemental atoms which it picks out of the soil, the 
air and the raindrop along those lines of sym- 
metry which accord with some predetermined pat- 
tern, excites our wonder, and well it may. But 
what think you would be our astonishment if for 
the first time, while yet wholly unprepared by any 
prior experience or by any intimation from any 
one, we should witness the whole tree bursting into 
bloom and afterward throughout its branches 
blending with rounded and ripening fruit? 

The marvelous transformation of the crawling 
worm into a winged insect equipped with a new 
set of instinctive impulses suited to the new mode 
of life into which it is suddenly summoned is a 
similar carrying out in animal life of a double 
commission. How these two purposes are kept 
distinct, what determines the time of transition, 
and how the change is wrought, are impenetrable 
mysteries. The early Christians in their adopt- 
ing the butterfly as the emblem of their faith in 
immortality clearly indicate their belief that 
through some such mysterious change as that 
going on inside the hard, coarse coat of the chry- 
salis a psychical body is being built for us within 
the physical by the same commissioned organiz- 
ing force. 



110 MAN'S TOMORROW 

To suppose that after death the human spirit 
for any length of time, however brief, is to be 
in a disembodied state is contrary to all the teach- 
ings of science as to the history of force. Such 
a state is not only beyond our experience, it is 
beyond even our conception. The very existence 
of any force is revealed to us solely through its 
effect on matter, through its intimate linkings 
with it, and it is through this very channel that 
the existence of even matter itself is made known, 
for divorce from it the forces that are lodged in 
it and you will strip it of all its characteristics, of 
everything that serves to reveal its existence to 
our senses. As we know absolutely nothing of the 
nature of the substratum of matter, we know not 
what would be left, or whether anything would 
be, were all force taken away, and so, on the other 
hand, it is absolutely impossible for us to con- 
ceive not only how force could operate without 
matter, but how it could even exist without it. 
There is no law whose universal prevalence has 
been more thoroughly established by scientists, 
and whose importance is more uniformly con- 
ceded, than the law of contiguity. When, then, 
through scientific research we reach the conclusion 
that the soul is immortal, we find ourselves 
strongly impelled to the further conclusion that 
each soul has two bodies, both organized and simi- 
larly equipped with sense-perception, one within 
the other and invisible to it, though none the less 
a real material entity, and that this second in- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 111 

strument becomes the principal one when the first 
is worn out and cast aside. The soul must be in- 
dividualized by some sort of material covering, as 
otherwise it cannot enter into any relations with 
an exterior environment. We cannot conceive of 
any force, human or divine except as encased in 
some sort of a body which it has organized and 
continues to maintain by its interpenetrating 
vitalization. We may not now have any scales 
with which to weigh this body, or measuring tape 
with which to ascertain its dimensions, or eyes to 
trace out its contour, yet we must conceive it to 
exist as the spirit's possible dwelling place. The 
spirit must thus in our thought be isolated and 
individualized, or we shall be in a state of mental 
confusion regarding it. To affirm that it has no 
form, that it fills immensity, is to affirm what to 
us is absolutely unthinkable. Out of what kind 
of matter the second body is made we can not tell, 
it being too etherealized to come within the reach 
of our miscroscopes or of our chemical tests. 
That it really exists is not only thus logically es- 
tablished, but very strongly suggested by those 
strange psychical phenomena to which we have 
already directed attention. It is quite possible 
that the difference between the two bodies con- 
sists not in the material used, but in the degree of 
vitalization that has taken place, in the control 
secured by the organizing force. Why need we 
go further for a solution of the mystery? 
Whether this second body will be the only other 



112 MAN'S TOMORROW 

one the spirit will ever weave about itself, whether 
this will prove sufficient for all its after-needs, 
there are no means of determining; but of this we 
can rest assured: that for the purpose of further 
intellectual and moral development the spirit will 
somewhere, in some way, be still furnished with 
the needed bodily and world-environment of dis- 
ciplinary suffering and struggle until the great 
work of evolution already carried on through the 
vast eons of the past becomes complete. 

The invisible second body to which I have re- 
ferred may survive, as perhaps it has preceded, 
this entire series of changes, and finally be the 
only enswathment of the soul. Of this we can 
feel assured: that the final, permanent body will 
be free from all those imperfections and limita- 
tions which were designed for, and are suited solely 
to, the work of character-building. It only re- 
mains for us to determine what these imperfec- 
tions and limitations actually are in order to 
judge what the characteristics of the final body 
will be after these have served their purpose dur- 
ing the preliminary periods of moral development. 
There is one way, and only one, in which 
science can be of service to us in our attempts to 
unravel the deep mysteries of the life beyond, and 
that is by definitely determining the main trend 
of the divine purpose by what has already been 
accomplished. God has unquestionably carried 
out in Nature enough of his plans for us to in- 
telligently trace their principal outlines and pre- 



MAN'S TOMORROW US 

diet their result if we will carefully study the drift 
of the centuries as scientific investigations disclose 
it to us. A sufficient segment of the circle has 
been given us to find its center and complete its 
periphery. It is now the settled belief of the whole 
thinking world that in the changes thus far 
effected there is observable a far-reaching plan of 
evolution — a patient, persistent, orderly advance 
from chaos to cosmos, from the simple to the com- 
plex, from inorganic to organic, from first faint 
glimmerings of vegetable and animal vitality to 
the highest forms of self conscious and morally 
responsible spirit-life. 

The contention of to-day is not as to the fact 
of an orderly evolution, but as to the interpreta- 
tion of that fact ; one school of thought holding 
that differences in kind are but the gradual ac- 
cumulations of differences in degree, primal mat- 
ter possessing the promise and the potency of all 
life, to be finally unfolded through some inherent 
impulse working in accordance with inexorable 
law; the other school maintaining, and I think 
with better show of reason, that for the for- 
warding of the grand purpose necessarily new 
forces have from time to time been introduced 
from without by some watchful and efficient intel- 
ligence. We are safe in assuming, as I have al- 
ready attempted to show, that composite man with 
his pronounced personality is unquestionably the 
ultimate goal of God's endeavor ; that with the per- 
fecting of this, the embodiment of his long-cher- 



114 MAN'S TOMORROW 

ished ideal, his purpose will be completed. And 
now we may further safely and confidently as- 
sume that God will finally reach the full realiza- 
tion of his creative thought by continuing to fol- 
low along those very lines of evolution that have 
characterized his work thus far — that of both an 
uncurtaining and unfettering of this very same 
supremely gifted spirit upon which he has left 
the imprint of his image and to which he has of- 
fered the priceless privilege of his own companion- 
ship forever. I ask your attention, then, while I 
point out with some degree of particularity these 
two phases of evolution as brought to .light by the 
science of physics and of metaphysics, and of per- 
sonal and national history, for here and here 
alone, as I have said, does science afford us any 
sure words of phophecy as to what physically, in- 
tellectually, and morally we are destined to be- 
come if we lovingly consent to the perfecting in 
us of the divine purpose. 

First as to the uncurtaining: 

There may be noticed everywhere in Nature a 
carefully contrived and a most consummately ex- 
ecuted plan of concealment. Our spirits are 
housed in bodies furnished with five instruments of 
search, marvelously constructed, it is true, and of 
marvelous power, but nevertherless of quite pro- 
nounced limitations. With our sense of sight we 
fail to discover even in our clearest northern skies 
aught else than minute spangles of light, and only 
after centuries of scientific training we learn to 



MAN'S TOMORROW 115 

regard these specks as ponderous worlds whirling 
through the measureless depths of space. To the 
great mass of mankind only here and there one 
of the thousand nebulas with their innumerable sys- 
tems of suns and satellites is in the least visible, 
and it appears but as a thin, fleecy fleck of cloud 
on the face of the heavens. Even the Milky Way, 
of which we form part, is to our unaided vision 
but a dim, diffused haze of inextricably interwoven 
threads of light. Our own moon, comparatively 
so near, seems but a smooth disk, and its edge, 
though actually serrated by mountain peaks, but 
a line of interrupted curve. 

Not only is creation thus hidden from us by 
immeasurable distance, but also by an infinite 
minuteness. A drop of vinegar we now know is a 
wide lake peopled and disported in by hundreds of 
organized living creatures. This thronging mul- 
titude of sentient life is as absolutely curtained 
from our perception as it would be were the drop 
this moment plunging down some precipice on the 
planet Mars. 

A hiding is also effected by extreme tenuity. A 
drop of water may be converted into viewless 
steam, or chemically torn asunder into two invis- 
ible, imponderable, and odorless gases. 

There is still another method, to us seemingly 
past finding out, in which matter has been removed 
from our field of vision. The existence of that 
luminiferous ether to which I have referred as 
accepted by science illustrates this, a fluid filling 



116 MAN'S TOMORROW 

not only all interstellar spaces, but so completely 
permeating all substances that it absolutely in- 
cases every separate molecule composing even the 
most compact. 

The vast majority of material phenomena 
equally elude the detection of our other organs of 
sense. We can but concede that there are number- 
less sights and sounds and odors and flavors abso- 
lutely beyond our detection if we study the panto- 
mine of the lowest animal life going on about us. 
These organs, by which alone we can lift any of 
the curtains of concealment, not only have thus 
very restricted capacities, but are soon fatigued, 
are easily deranged, distorting all they tell ; some- 
times are, one or more of them, taken away alto- 
gether through accident or disease. Morever, the 
bodies themselves in which these organs are set 
are so cumbersome that they are with the greatest 
difficulty and with most provoking slowness tran- 
sported from place to place by the eager spirits 
which they seemingly so inadequately serve. 

Why were we shut up in bodies thus so limited, 
with but five little dusty windows through which 
to catch at the best very imperfect and unsatis- 
factory glimpses of the world outside? Surely 
the purpose was not to hide it from us perma- 
nently, for we have been gifted not only with an 
insatiable curiosity, but also with inexhaustible 
material and mental resources for drawing aside 
the countless curtains. We have pierced the stel- 
lar spaces with our telescopes and disentangled the 



MAN'S TOMORROW 117 

light of nebulas; with our spectroscopes we have 
solved the riddle of the sun; and so successfully 
have we supplemented our senses that even the 
regions of the infinitesimal scientists have reached 
and ransacked with their cunningly devised in- 
struments of search. 

Not only are many of the phenomena of matter 
thus hidden, but absolutely all of the forces which 
produce them, the wonder workers persistently 
keeping their faces closely veiled. The same holds 
true in reference to all those vegetable and animal 
forces which with most consummate constructive 
skill enwrap themselves in organisms faultless in 
symmetry and in the adaptiveness of their vari- 
ous parts to the demands of their respective envi- 
ronments. That giant redwood of California is 
the spacious palace home of some viewless fairy 
which through the lengthened lapse of centuries 
with tireless industry has incorporated, cell by 
cell, its grand ideal from the crude material it has 
gathered from the earth and air about it. Its 
strong pulses beat to the very tips of the many 
million leaves that glance in the sunlight, yet, 
strange to say, it once found within the micro- 
scopic walls of a single germ ample room for a 
home and a hiding place. The spirit that looks 
out from the flashing eyes and that inspires the 
lightning leap of the fierce tiger was once im- 
prisoned in an egg too small to be seen without 
most powerful lenses, and too fragile to withstand 
any but the gentlest touch of human fingers. 



118 MAN'S TOMORROW 

These vital forces in their essential nature are still 
to us profoundest mysteries. Even to become 
acquainted with the conditions under which they 
are commissioned to work their wonders has de- 
manded from us a most patient and critical study, 
and still even here our eager hands have suc- 
ceeded in only partially drawing aside the hiding 
curtain. 

Instinct, as to its working methods and real es- 
sence, also presents problems that have perplexed 
the most painstaking and thoroughly equipped 
investigators of all ages, and have received at best 
but partial solution. Our own nature, origin, and 
destiny — matters to us of such transcendent mo- 
ment — remain to this day, after centuries of re- 
search, essentially sealed secrets. And he who 
has so carefully contrived and consummately ex- 
ecuted this plan of concealment has seen fit to hide 
even himself, making darkness his throne, and his 
pavilion the thick clouds of the sky. 

Why is this curtain thus drawn about us every- 
where? Why is one corner of it so tantalizingly 
lifted? Why are we endowed with such irrepres- 
sible curiosity to get full view of what we at the 
first are permitted but the faintest glimpse, or of 
whose existence we are informed only by some 
vague suggestion? Why are there such multitu- 
dinous resources without and within us for un- 
earthing these secrets hidden so carefully in the 
vast domain of matter and of mind? Sufficient 
answers may be found in the fact that thus there 



MAN'S TOMORROW 119 

are furnished us fields for thought, possibilities 
for virtue, occasions and capacities for joy. If 
we will carefully inquire into these, God's modes 
and means of carrying out his vast scheme of 
evolution, we shall be wonderfully helped in our 
attempts to study into human destiny, into the 
nature of our future bodily endowments, of our 
mental activities, and of our spiritual and emo- 
tional life. 

First, this plan of concealment affords us wide 
fields for thought. Our minds in the beginning 
are total blanks, our guides being simply a few 
instinctive impulses. The world into which we 
are introduced is to us, absolutely, terra incog- 
nita. With but germinal capacity, with faculties 
untrained, with no stock of experience or acquisi- 
tion of knowledge, we enter upon our careers. 
Growth by means of a ceaseless activity is the law 
of our life. Keen curiosity is the first intimation 
of our mental awakening, and this mind-thirst 
thus beginning with our birth never ceases so long 
as we are in a condition of health, but proves in- 
satiable and of an ever-increasing intensity. Con- 
genital or acquired differences in taste or aptitude 
lead us into separate fields of exploration, to the 
rendering of different interpretations of the ob- 
jects or operations in Nature about us. Com- 
panies of adventurers sail unknown seas, trace the 
configurations of strange continents, and follow 
rivers through their tortuous windings into dense 
forests, over wide prairie land, through canon and 



120 MAN'S TOMORROW 

mountain gorge to their fountain heads, fighting 
against wind and tide, enduring arctic cold and 
tropic heat, braving dangers from wild beasts and 
still wilder tribes of men, suffering the pangs of 
hunger, even willingly laying down their lives that 
they may lift from off the face of the planet the 
curtain of mystery. The flora and fauna of new- 
found continents then become to botanists and 
naturalists objects of profound study, while geo- 
logists, going below the surface, read in the fossil 
forms imbedded in the folds of earth's mantle 
records of countless centuries of change. Chem- 
ists and biologists extend still further human in- 
quiry into the labyrinthian mazes of Nature's ar- 
canum; psychologists and metaphysicians explore 
the realms of mind, while earnest theologians es- 
say to enter the august presence even of the soul 
itself and of its creating God. 

Thus many sided Nature has been undergoing 
the sharp scrutiny of the many-eyed mind of man, 
and in the world's great libraries and museums 
are garnered the rich returns of this indefatigable 
research of the ages. Yet secrets are still locked 
up in creation and exploring parties are still push- 
ing out in every direction, keenly alert to discover 
something new. 

Will this mental activity ever cease? Will 
there ever come a time when the last hiding cur- 
tain will have been lifted, the last secret solved, the 
last craving of curiosity satisfied? Will it be pos- 
sible for man ever to explore all the mysteries of 



MAN'S TOMORROW 121 

the universe and have no further food for 
thought? To answer these questions in the affirma- 
tive we must assume that God's own thought-life 
and creative activity will cease, or that we shall 
through persistent disobedience sink down into 
apathy and be finally cut off from any further in- 
tercourse with him. It is reasonable for us, then, 
to anticipate that the final bodies of those of us 
who through a loving obedience attain unto eter- 
nal life will differ from these present ones in being 
more serviceable to the mind, more completely 
under its control, with none of their interpretative 
senses lessened either in number or power, but ren- 
dered rather more acute and accurate. The 
changes effected in them will be such as not to 
retard mental activity, but to quicken it. Present 
defects that can be overcome by our own invented 
appliances we should not, therefore, expect to have 
removed by God, since this would so far lessen the 
incentives to mental activity and so far keep back 
that evolution which he has so carefully planned. 
They will, however, know no fatigue, feel no 
pain, meet with no disaster, be a slave to no devas- 
tating passion. Fire will not scorch them, beasts 
devour them, poison prey upon their tissues and 
sap their life, but mind will be their absolute mas- 
ter. It has now only partial control; vitalization 
is as yet incomplete. It will be simply by render- 
ing this vitalization, this spirit-dominance over 
matter and all disintegrating forces, absolutely 
supreme that these favorable changes will be 



122 MAN'S TOMORROW 

wrought. We have no occasion for supposing 
that any change will occur in the nature of the 
different forces, but merely in the degree of sov- 
ereignty which the human spirit will have over 
all those that are below it, brought about through 
the perfecting of its loving obedience to all above. 
This is the already declared order of divine har- 
mony, as we shall show farther on. We are, in 
other words, to become more thoroughly alive, 
more masterful, and this increased sovereignty 
will unquestionably be given as soon as God finds 
it safe and desirable, as soon as our moral school- 
ing through pain and weakness and danger and 
grief is ended, and we have developed fully in vir- 
tue, for a time will come when there will be no 
more moral growth, no further need for discipline, 
when those of us who have continued lovingly obe- 
dient will have attained unto the stature of the 
perfect Christ, though mental activity and growth 
will go on and on forever. 

In the picture, presented to us in the gospels, of 
Jesus during his forty days' sojourn following 
his death, we have depicted the power over the 
body which every soul may expect as soon as the 
last victory over evil has been won. We will not 
now stop to discuss whether that account is his- 
torically true, although it is in such admirable 
keeping with all that has gone before and presents 
such a faultless finish to a life so divine, that I, 
for one, cannot but place confidence in its verity. 
It at least furnishes a most apt illustration of what 



MAN'S TOMORROW 123 

the permanent body will be if the present plan of 
evolution is carried out, and surely we have a right 
to expect it will, when the spirit has entered upon 
its final and full dominion over it. It is said that 
flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of 
heaven ; true, for flesh and blood as understood by 
us are but partially vitalized matter, liable to de- 
terioration and disintegration, a heavy clog on 
the spirit. Over the body of the risen Christ 
neither disease nor death had any more power. 
No hostile force could mar it. It could be trans- 
ported at will, even lifted up beyond the clouds, 
gravity being completely overborne by the sov- 
ereign spirit within. About it could be thrown a 
mantle of invisibility. It could be at once so ethe- 
realized as to be passed through closed doors, so 
condensed into tangible material as to partake of 
honey and fish, and to so present the print of the 
nails and of the spear-thrust to the doubting 
Thomas as to persuade him again to believe. The 
appearance of its face and the very tones of its 
voice could be so changed as to escape the recog- 
nition of those who had known and loved Christ 
best. It could be transfigured with the ineffable 
glory of an angel and tread again the crested 
waves of Lake Gennesaret on an errand of love. 
No behest of the spirit could it fail to obey, for it 
was no longer flesh and blood, no longer matter 
having an unstable equilibrium, the sport of con- 
tending forces, but matter mastered, glorified, re- 
deemed. Not only will a body thus become the 



124 MAN'S TOMORROW 

permanent and perfected instrument of the mind, 
having organs of sense-perception, and that great- 
est of all organs, the organ of thought, and per- 
forming all the functions which the mind's eternal 
activities will require, thus keeping it in touch 
with the material universe that environs it and 
reveals to it through its incarnations God's own 
thought-life through the ages, but the mind itself 
will have its visions cleared from pride and pre- 
conceived opinions, prejudices and passions, and 
all those distracting and distorting influences that 
becloud it while the moral battle is raging, and 
with a tireless brain and inexhaustible nerve-power 
to do its bidding, it will unquestionably make 
mighty strides in its quests for truth. To sup- 
pose, as most of us have been taught to do, that 
we shall in some mysterious way grasp by intui- 
tive insight all knowledge instantly, and not be 
compelled to go through long processes of reason- 
ing and make protracted inquiry by patient, per- 
sistent experiment, as is our present experience, 
is unquestionably fallacious, as we can readily see, 
for were this the case there could be no continuous 
history of mental evolution, as that involves grad- 
ual accretions of knowledge and an ever-increasing 
grasp of thought. It would be contrary to the 
whole mode of God's working hitherto. What we 
have warrant in looking for is a steady growth, a 
perpetual unfolding from century to century, from 
age to age. We possess in part, and occasionally 
exercise even now, intuitional power; but this is 



MAN'S TOMORROW 125 

designed to supplement, not supplant, the delib- 
erate self-conscious ratiocination that is the lead- 
ing characteristic of our present thought-life. We 
have every reason to believe that, in strict accord- 
ance with this plan of evolution that has marked 
God's course thus far through the centuries, as 
science teaches, there will still be carried on, not 
only on this side of the grave, but beyond it, all 
the varied activities of the universe. Man will 
acquire continually deeper insight into the divine 
thought and enter into closer touch with the life 
of the divine love. 

The "knowledge" which the Bible affirms "shall 
vanish away" is only that supposed knowledge of 
which blind men boast that is so mixed with mis- 
chievous error. This surely will vanish away and 
juster conception eventually prevail, but death 
will not instantly transform us from intellectual 
babes into athletes, from untutored savages into 
deeply versed angels of light. That would not be 
evolution, but creation. As in virtue, so in knowl- 
edge, we "must mount to the summit round by 
round." The insight and mental training we here 
acquire will not be lost, but will mightily avail in 
our further search for truth. We have no assur- 
ance that we will ever see the essence of things, 
that we will ever be permitted to look into the un- 
veiled face of a force, will ever be permitted to 
lift the hiding curtain of matter from before any 
living spirit. What I conceive that prophecy to 
mean — "For now we see through a glass darkly; 



126 MAN'S TOMORROW 

but then face to face ; now I know in part ; but then 
shall I know even as also I am known" — I can best 
explain after having pointed out how by means of 
this same carefully executed plan of concealment 
the supreme work of character-building is at last 
accomplished. To a consideration of this, the 
second purpose and achievement, we will now turn. 
There is not a single moral trait that is not the 
outgrowth of a struggle with temptation, a victory 
over it. When Adam came from the hand of his 
Creator he was simply innocent. He had not a 
particle of moral character, good or bad. God — 
and we say it reverently — had no power to endow 
him with any. Could he by his creative fiat have 
placed him and his posterity on the earth full pan- 
oplied at the very outset in all those noble attri- 
butes that have so sweetened human life and 
crowned human history with unfading glory, and 
could he have made it impossible for any of them 
ever to have fallen from this eminence, would he 
not surely have done it? Would he not have 
avoided if he could those terrible battle-scenes 
that have marked not only ever age and country, 
but every hamlet, every home, every human heart? 
All he had power to do was to create the condi- 
tions out of which character might be developed; 
that is, to establish codes of law or to reveal codes 
already established; to endow us with moral per- 
ceptions and grant us absolute freedom of choice. 
Simply the possibilities of virtue, not virtue itself, 
lay within the range of his creative energy. It 



MAN'S TOMORROW 127 

is only out of the exercise of free choice in the 
presence of temptation that our virtues ever have 
or ever can come. Now the question arises, Would 
not the drawing aside of the curtains of conceal- 
ment, whose folds fall about us everywhere, re- 
move all those temptations without which traits of 
character can never be evolved? 

In that striking allegory of paradisiacal life 
given in Genesis, in which is vividly pictured the 
fall of our first parents, we find an affirmative 
answer. The devil dealt in subterfuge. The ser- 
pent, because of his universal repute for low cun- 
ning that courts concealment, is selected to carry 
on the fabled colloquy, and stands ever after 
throughout the sacred writings, until at last in 
Revelation he is represented as hurled chained into 
the bottomless pit, as the most fitting symbol of 
the satanic influence at work in the world. Sup- 
pose all hearts had been unveiled then and there; 
suppose Adam and Eve could have unraveled at 
once and completely the subtle sophistry sug- 
gested by their own appetites, passions, and pro- 
pensities, and by the shrewd insinuations of the 
evil one ; that they with unerring vision could have 
seen the final, fearful consequences of their disobe- 
dience; suppose the devil had been conscious that 
the baseness of his motives, the hollowness of his 
professions of friendship, the hurtful falsehoods 
in his assertions, were all laid bare; and, lastly, 
suppose that God's personal presence and full 
knowledge of what was going on, his utter abhor- 



128 MAN'S TOMORROW 

rence of sin and boundless sympathy and solici- 
tude for these new occupants of his universe, had 
been fully revealed, think you the scene here de- 
scribed, or any similar one, could ever have oc- 
curred? The moment you unmask the devil you 
unnerve him. He can fight only under cover. 
Place the serpent at full length on bare ground, 
know that his only purpose is to stab with a pois- 
oned dagger, have him ever at the front, be able 
to measure the length of his spring before he 
makes it, be cognizant of his murderous thought 
before he can carry it into execution, and he would 
be as harmless as any beast of the field. Let him 
know that he is ever shadowed by a sleepless eye, 
and, if he has a tithe of the shrewdness he is cred- 
ited with, he would never spend his energies in a 
spring. 

If we study carefully the scenes and dialogues 
of that wonderful drama the Book of Job, the old- 
est and profoundest poem known to literature, we 
will see how constantly in the plot was employed 
the element of mystery, how absolutely essential it 
was for the developing in the hero of that singular 
patience which some unknown Shakespeare of the 
Orient, prompted by a divine impulse, has here so 
masterfully portrayed. The devil is represented, 
you remember, as thrusting himself with cool ef- 
frontery into the presence of Jehovah while a com- 
pany of angels was holding audience, as having 
spoken very sneeringly of the far famed piety of 
Job, and as having been allowed the free use of all 



MAN'S TOMORROW 129 

the destructive and tormenting forces in Nature 
for subjecting it to the severest tests his fertile 
fancy could devise. Robber bands, thunder-bolts, 
and cyclones strip Job of his possessions, death 
desolates his fireside, painful disease makes his 
burning body a burden, three black demons 
masked as consoling friends pour the poison of 
malign interpretation into his wounded sensibili- 
ties and basely attempt to befog his reason; to 
crown all, she who had shared his heart's riches 
and life's hopes, and in the happy years had borne 
to him the children whose freshly dug graves were 
still wet with his tears, she, the cherished wife of 
his bosom, had in his darkest hour turned tempter, 
calling on him to curse God and die. 

Had every hiding curtain been torn from before 
the actors in this drama; had Job, his wife, his 
three professed friends, the sneering, mischief- 
loving imp, all seen eye to eye, all known each 
other's most secret thoughts ; had Job been able to 
estimate this world's blessings at their true worth, 
to penetrate without reserve the secret purposes 
of Providence, to have continued in uninterrupted 
interchange of thought and sympathy with the 
now speechless dead; had the horizon of his con- 
ceptions and certain knowledge swept through all 
the buried past and to the furthest future — his 
patience would never have been thus tried, and 
without some such temptation he could never have 
attained that eminence of virtue for which he is 
now so justly famed. 



130 MAN'S TOMORROW 

In the narration of Christ's temptation we have 
pictured one of the great crises in his history. 
The incident is unquestionably cast in poetic mold, 
and for the drapery of the thought there has again 
been selected the favorite form of allegory. The 
underlying, essential truth can be readily dis- 
cerned. The struggle was, as I regard it, an in- 
ner, mental one, which uniformly and necessarily 
arises in a young man's experiences as soon as he 
discovers himself the possessor of any valuable 
personal gifts. He is called to decide whether he 
shall use his endowments selfishly to appease ap- 
petite, promote pride, or procure power, or, 
rising superior to personal considerations, in a 
spirit of self-sacrifice, employ them in the work 
of a world's reclaim. Christ here must have been 
approached on the side of his human limitations ; 
otherwise he was not, as is affirmed, tempted in 
all points as we are, and could never claim at our 
hands any meed of praise. He must have had the 
same imperfect mental vision, the same lack of ex- 
perience, blinding propensities, short-sighted 
pride, and worldly ambition, together with the 
same moral discernment and freedom of will — yes, 
and the same sustaining grace vouchsafed every 
disciple. He stood apart only in this — that he 
maintained from the first an unswerving loyalty 
to his convictions of truth and duty. 

It was surely a shrinking, sensitive human soul 
groping in the dark which wrestled in prayer 
through that last long night in Gethsemane. That 



MAN'S TOMORROW 131 

was no mock petition, "Father, if it be possible 
let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not my 
will but thine be done." 

This scene presupposes two separate wills — one 
without compulsion submissive to the other; two 
separate intelligences — one in its range of vision, 
its depths of insight, superior to the other. If 
Christ had positively known there was no other 
way, if all curtains had been drawn from before 
his eyes, he would not again and again have 
groaned out this prayer with an agony so great 
as to cause beads of bloody sweat to redden his 
brow. He must have received in answer assur- 
ances from a higher source than his own unaided 
intellect to have achieved that conquering calm 
that so marked his conduct ever after — at the ar- 
rest, during the trial, amid desertions by friends, 
under taunts by the rabble, and at last through 
the humiliation and torture of his execution. 

I question whether it was explained to Christ's 
human soul during those hours of passionate 
pleading precisely why human redemption could 
not be achieved except through his crucifixion, 
but am persuaded that his after-calm came by his 
having been assured by God that he had again 
through his earnest solicitation carefully recon- 
sidered the whole question and could not devise 
any other way, and then by Christ's resting with 
absolute trust in the wisdom and tender love of 
the Father, he having brought himself to say 
without reserve, "Thy will be done." Thus as- 



132 MAN'S TOMORROW 

sured and thus resigned, he rose from his knees 
a victor. 

How oppressive and profound must have been 
the life long loneliness of Christ ! For how many 
years he endured the monotony, fatigue, privation, 
and obscurity of an ordinary artisan in a little 
quiet country town ! Neighbors passed him in the 
street, bartered with him in the bazaar, hired him 
at his trade, talked over with him the ordinary 
news and passing interests of the neighborhood — 
even his brothers met him daily in the more inti- 
mate relationships of the home circle — and never 
once the faintest suspicion crossed the mind of 
any one of them that there was here something 
more than a plain, plodding artisan; that there 
were ripening here mental gifts and an impreg- 
nable moral purpose that were destined to place 
their possessor in the forefront of all the ages. 

Christ must have frequently felt the restless- 
ness of genius ; there must have crossed his 
thoughts frequent foreshadowings of his strange 
destiny. It is not disclosed in the record pre- 
cisely when his human soul entered into that 
mystic union with Divinity which is plainly rec- 
ognizable in the utterances and acts of his public 
ministry. For aught we know, he may during 
those long formative years have awakened into a 
divine consciousness. 

Whether this divine nature, and the conscious- 
ness of it by the human, came then or later, we 
may rightly admire and wonder at his power of 



MAN'S TOMORROW 133 

self -repression ; for, whichever was true, his hu- 
man will must always have been as free as ours. 
The closely folded spirit-wings never once rent 
apart the coarse coat of the carpenter; the inef- 
fable spirit-glory never suffused the weather- 
beaten face of this unpretending young man at 
Nazareth. He plodded on, week in and week out, 
year in and year out, until a day came at whose 
close he shut down for the last time the lid of his 
tool chest, and for the last time swung behind 
him his shop door. But though his private arti- 
san career was thus forever ended, and during the 
next three years wondering multitudes became 
witnesses of his miracles of power, hung breath- 
less on his eloquent utterances of living truth, 
thrilled to the mighty heart beat of his matchless 
love, yet the world comprehended him not. He 
never was without the discipline of being maligned 
by his enemies, even of being misunderstood by 
his nearest friends. He without doubt could have 
made a self-revelation so unmistakable that even 
Pharisees and scribes would have been struck 
dumb and misinterpretation been forever at an 
end. Now and then, on special occasions for a 
brief moment, one corner of the hiding curtain 
was lifted. The money changers who fled so pre- 
cipitately from the court of the temple, the Roman 
soldiers who came with Judas to take Christ, must 
have caught a glimpse in the Master's countenance 
of a mysterious something that filled them with 
blank dismay. His disciples thought they saw a 



134 MAN'S TOMORROW 

spirit when during that night of tempest he 
walked toward them on the foam-capped waves of 
Lake Gennesaret and issued to the warring ele- 
ments his mandate of peace. Peter, James, and 
John were filled with wondering and worshiping 
awe when on the mount he stood one rapt moment 
in the glory of his transfiguration. But he knew 
well that such revelations must be extremely rare 
or the purposes of his mission could never be ac- 
complished. Christ, while he was God manifested 
in the flesh, was also God concealed. Both the 
manifestation and the concealment were but par- 
tial, and necessarily so. Had Christ dwelt among 
men with his divinity completely unmasked, slav- 
ish fear would at once have dominated every heart. 
As well shut up a man's body in a vacuum and ex- 
pect it to thrive as thrust his soul into the imme- 
diate unveiled presence of its God. Infringe upon 
its freedom, and it becomes a characterless ma- 
chine. Expose its delicate petals of moral attri- 
bute to the full noonday glare of a Divine pres- 
ence, and they at once would shrivel into remedi- 
less death under the fierce furnace heat. God has 
acted seemingly in constant recognition of this 
truth in his dealings with the human race through 
all the centuries. His revelation in providence 
and in the inspired Word has been very far from 
complete, he increasing the light only so fast as 
we could bear it and still be free. 

In Christ's experiences we find our own re- 
flected. Similar opportunities for self-repression 



MAN'S TOMORROW 135 

and self-assertion are afforded us by this wide- 
reaching plan of concealment, and it rests with us 
to determine what the result shall be. We have 
come into the world charged each with a divine 
commission, and if we be earnest and true we too 
will be straitened until it be accomplished. God 
has woven for us in those marvelous looms of his, 
whose noiseless shuttles never rest, curtains of 
every conceivable variety of pattern and texture 
and closeness of thread. To succeed in drawing 
these aside, to reveal to others our inner selves, 
for which God had with far-reaching purposes im- 
planted in every one of us an insatiable longing, 
will demand a resolute mastery of many a diffi- 
culty which has by himself or through his sufferance 
been thrust in our way. The careers of those 
who have left the impress of their individuality on 
the activities and achievements of their age in the 
department of thought or action are full of strik- 
ing illustrations of this truth. Bodily defects have 
been overcome; stammering tongues made elo- 
quent; weak voices strong; indistinct articulation 
clear; sensitive nerves unflinching and feeble 
muscles firm and hard as bands of steel. Mental 
diffusiveness and inattention have been changed 
into protracted concentration, a treacherous mem- 
ory into a retentive and ready one, deficient ob- 
servation into alertness, and sluggish sensibilities 
kindled into intensest fervor. The mysteries and 
difficulties in Nature, as well as the more formid- 
able hindrances of sickness and poverty, preju- 



136 MAN'S TOMORROW 

dice and jealous hate and cruel accusation, have 
been mastered by many a heroic soul; constitu- 
tional dread of intruding and of meeting rebuff 
overcome; dangers, open and covert, braved; the 
alienation of misconceiving friends borne with a 
patient sorrow; death itself faced in quivering 
agony of nerve and heart-break on crosses of 
shame in a passionate longing for utterance and 
final recognition. 

Firmness and courage and faith and all-con- 
quering love are thus demanded and developed. 
Earth has no grander sight than that of some 
nobly aspiring soul waiting with sweet Christian 
resignation and confiding hope some far-off age, 
and, if need be, some other world for kindred souls 
to see it as it is. 

Through lack of self-knowledge and of world- 
knowledge we are often led to aspire in this life 
for what we can never attain. But our unselfish 
aspirations are the patent of our nobility, evi- 
dences of divine sonship. They outlast the grave, 
and I doubt not will find embodiment and uncur- 
taining in the promised by and by. Our duty 
now and here is to labor and to wait. 

Serene I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor fret at wind or tide or sea ; 
I rave no more 'gainst time and fate, 
For lo! my own shall come to me." 

Not only are others in great part hidden from 
us and we from them, but we soon discover how 



MAN'S TOMORROW 137 

little we know even of our own selves. In our 
hours of introspective thought we seem to be 
wandering through the vast galleries of some spir- 
itual Mammoth Cave deeply sunk from the sun's 
glare and the deafening din of the thronged ave- 
nues of this world's life. On and on with dimly 
lighted torches we cautiously feel our way, gal- 
lery opening into gallery in seemingly endless suc- 
cession. In our farthest, most daring explora- 
tions into the hidden recesses of our own person- 
ality we still hear the murmurings of far-away 
waters as they flow through their secret channels 
off into the unknown dark. We draw back in 
wonderment and heartfelt fear. It is in these sol- 
emn seasons of self-searching we are taught self- 
distrust and Divine dependence. It is in some 
one of these mental and moral awakenings we in 
holy, childlike trust at last sink down into the 
Everlasting Arms. 

Thus in countless ways God curtains our 
spirits and delegates countless hands to hold the 
curtains down, while at the same time he implants 
within us countless impulses to draw them up. 
Out of the ceaseless struggle thus incited there is 
unfolded human virtue, the bright consummate 
flower of human life. 

Of course until the soul has been fully perfected 
thus through suffering and struggle it will still 
be inclosed within these closely folded curtains of 
concealment. The mere incident of physical 
death can not change those modes of moral evo- 



138 MAN'S TOMORROW 

lution which during all the ages past till now have 
characterized God's plan. I fail to see not only 
any need for such change, but even any possibil- 
ity of it, for the necessity as well as the condi- 
tions of moral growth must remain essentially the 
same. As long as any virtue of the germinal soul 
remains but partially developed and there is still 
manifested any impulse for growth toward the 
true and the good, there will unquestionably be 
provided somewhere similar environment suited to 
its needs. God will never cease to strive with any 
soul until either through its own unyielding per- 
verseness it finally destroys all its moral suscep- 
tibilities, and through the immutable laws of spir- 
itual development sinks down into sluggish brute 
existence or below it, or else through its own 
nobler longings of love, proved and purified in 
the fierce furnace fires of affliction, it is lit up at 
last with the revealing light of God's infinite love, 
transformed into his likeness and made sharer in 
his life. 

It is these two widely contrasted states of spir- 
ituality that are properly denominated hell and 
heaven. It is into one or the other of them every 
soul inevitably develops through this great law of 
evolution under which science says the whole crea- 
tion moves. And from before every soul as it ad- 
vances toward one or the other of these two des- 
tinies all-hiding curtains will gradually be rolled 
away. Those who, through their perverse disobe- 
dience to the powers above them, will have become 



MAN'S TOMORROW 139 

enslaved to those below and have gradually lost 
their sovereignty over self and the surroundings 
of self, will find, with a chill of utter horror, that 
the very weakening of their vitality has widened 
the rents in the curtains of their concealment, as 
their bodies will bear the unmistakable imprint, 
despite all they can do, of their ever-deepening 
degradation. In vain, then, will they call on the 
rocks and the hills to cover them. It is on these 
very sin-distorted bodies of theirs God's recording 
angels will write their sentences of doom ! Those, 
on the other hand, who attain unto a perfect lib- 
erty through obedience to God's perfect law will 
find, greatly to their surprise and delight, after 
the discipline of struggle is ended, that through 
their increase of sovereign vitality their bodies 
will cease to be any longer either prison houses or 
closely-curtained apartments through which their 
souls can but dimly look out or the world look in. 
This more and more perfect revelation of the inner 
life which we thus see is inevitably to result in the 
carrying out of this great plan of evolution, will 
eventuate at the last in a permanent separation 
of the two classes, for we all then shall see face to 
face, shall know even as we are known. We shall 
find ourselves greatly assisted in our attempts to 
realize what marked changes will be wrought in 
these bodies when our spirits come into full vital- 
izing control over them if we keep in mind that 
all their present defects are simply due to a pres- 
ent lack of such control. There is nothing more 



140 MAN'S TOMORROW 

clearly taught in Nature than that there is in every 
one of us a divine ideal, our personal peculiar 
gift, with germinal impulses for unfolding; that 
its present forbidding environment is designed to 
serve simply as means for moral discipline and 
growth; that whatever is suited simply for this 
probationary period will be eliminated when no 
longer serviceable; that the body will be changed 
to suit its new uses ; that as at first it was designed 
chiefly to develop, but afterward, when probation 
is ended, simply to bring to light the inner life of 
the soul and promptly and perfectly to do its bid- 
ding, a most glorious transfiguration, through 
purely increased vitalization may be looked for. 
Not only may we confidently expect to have re- 
moved all defects of contour or of expression by 
color or carriage, all distortion or grossness of 
feature, all marring or maiming through disease, 
or accident, or age, or care-burden, or racial or 
family ties, or any former evil habit — any pecu- 
liarity, in short, that is not a part of the original 
divine ideal but rather an outcome of some un- 
toward circumstance or the temporary require- 
ment of some exigency in God's school of moral 
discipline — not only may we expect such defects 
to be removed, but we may also and with even 
brighter anticipation expect all the lineaments and 
expressions of face and form, all intonations of 
voice, all flitting shades of color, all outward 
gleamings from the eye, all words from the lips, 
to be soulful, soul-illumined, the very impersona- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 141 

tion of spiritual spontaneity. What glad sur- 
prises will greet us then ! What glad deliver- 
ances ! What glorious revelations of emotion and 
motive! No more estrangements through misun- 
derstandings ; no more heartburn ; no longer any 
lack of true appreciation, any timid reaching out 
of homesick souls longing for love ; no more stam- 
mering, awkward, half utterances of thoughts that 
burn within like a consuming fire; no more forced 
unions or separations ; no more temptings to sin- 
ful self-seeking, for in the white light of this final 
revelation of soul to soul, in which the very first 
inceptions of sin would be uncovered to every eye, 
all incentives to sin would become impossible. 
Christ prophesied with profoundest wisdom when 
he said: "They shall never perish, neither shall 
any pluck them out of my hand." There will be 
safety — absolute, eternal safety — when, after the 
ordeal of fire, from before all ransomed souls all 
curtains of concealment will have rolled away. 

But the query naturally arises, How shall we be 
able to recognize again, after such a change, our 
old companions and loved ones on the earth? How 
will the mother ever know again in that land of 
light the babe which, through a few brief months 
of joy, she so tenderly pressed to her heart, and 
then, with streaming eyes, saw pass away as mys- 
teriously as it came? How will the lonely 
orphan ever know again the long-lost mother of 
blessed memory, whose locks were silvered and 
form bent in anxious, loving care before God's 



142 MAN'S TOMORROW 

messenger came and bade her lay her burden 
down? These recognitions may take place through 
this same superior vitalizing power which the soul 
at last shall have attained, being able, as was 
Christ after his resurrection, to make his body 
appear the exact fac-simile of the old one, so that 
neither Thomas nor any of his other disciples 
might ever doubt, even in their darkest hours, that 
they had seen the risen Lord; or this recognition 
may be effected through that same indefinable 
spiritual impressment which seems to be the in- 
alienable birthright of every soul. We all have 
felt its mysterious influence many times in our 
lives. Some of us have noted how, after many 
years of separation, during which most radical 
changes have taken place through advancing age 
and new surroundings, after sorrow and care have 
wrought their terrible havoc, all at once, through 
something said or done, some look or tone, or 
something subtler still, the old feelings of intimacy 
are again rekindled, every barrier of strangeness 
vanishing instantly, as if touched by the wand of 
a master magician. 

By this wide-reaching plan of concealment there 
have been afforded not only fields for thought and 
possibilities for virtue, as I have attempted to 
show, but also occasions and capacities for joy. 
If we will carefully examine this, the third and 
last use to which this plan has, by a divine wisdom, 
been made serviceable, we will gain still deeper 
prophetic insight into the changes to be wrought, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 143 

through the all-prevailing law of evolution, in 
human destinies in the life beyond. I ask you 
again to note how I restrict myself in the depict- 
ing of what will be to simply the logical outcome 
of those purposes of God already clearly disclosed 
and partially consummated through past cen- 
turies, predicating my predictions on the belief 
that he will continue to work along the self-same 
lines which have thus far marked the ongoings of 
his providence, for surely we are safe in saying 
that he will complete what he has, age after age, 
with seemingly inexhaustible patience and pains- 
taking, carried thus far forward. 

Mysteries are everywhere. There is not a mo- 
ment in life when we do not feel a touch upon the 
shoulder and hear whispered to us in the air, 
"Come and see." Mankind are all seekers, and 
"I have found it!" is the ever-rising shout of the 
world's joy. Curiosity is the thirst of the mind. 
It is universal, deep-seated, commanding. So 
surcharged are we with it that a watchful and 
wise control is in constant requisition to prevent 
its tyrannizing over the faculties. Means for its 
gratification are apparently inexhaustible. Sci- 
entists, notwithstanding all their ingenious in- 
struments of search, their indefatigable and 
trained industry, their carefully planned sub-di- 
vision of labor, find, after busy centuries, that 
there are still outlying fields of unexplored 
thought and fountains of untasted pleasure. 
Neither telescopes nor microscopes have yet re- 



144 MAN'S TOMORROW 

vealed to us any bounds to God's universe. We 
have discovered nebula? so sunk in space that their 
rays of light before they reached us, though fly- 
ing twelve million miles a minute, were detained 
on the road thousands of years. The spectro- 
scope detects the presence of the one hundred and 
eighty millionth part of a grain of soda; the 
microscope has disclosed "in a bit of brain tissue 
one might hold on the point of a needle wonder- 
ful grouping of cells and lines of communicating 
fibers which rival in their adaptions and perfect- 
ness the order and rhythm of the heavens." A 
cerebral cell must indeed be infinitesimal if in the 
gray matter of every brain there are, as distin- 
guished mathematicians assure us, from one to 
three thousand millions. 

Creation is also so many-sided that it attracts 
people of every taste and endowment and degree 
of culture. In its interpretation the dull and un- 
lettered, as well as the world's mental magnates, 
find refreshment and solace and uplifting power. 
Differently constituted minds and the same minds 
in different moods approach Nature with differ- 
ently revealing capabilities, and derive from their 
search a different pleasure. God has lifted just 
enough of the curtain to pique our curiosity, 
placed just enough difficulties in the way of our 
getting full view to call out all our resources, and 
in so doing has provided for our being in the best 
possible mood to thrill with the revelation, our 
faculties and feelings being all enkindled, our ap- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 145 

preciative powers at the full, our whole nature on 
the lookout, roused as by a trumpet call. The 
anticipation of discovery is the incentive; the un- 
curtaining is the rich reward. There is joy in 
the shock of the surprise, the thing sought for 
bursting on the mind in sudden and dazzling 
splendor. The more keenly the appetite is 
whetted by long search, the more exquisite the 
joy at the uncurtaining. 

There will never be but little of this world's 
scenic wealth of beauty and of grandeur actually 
revealed to the bodily eyes of the vast majority 
of mankind. There are only a favored few who 
have the leisure or means for extensive travel, 
and they are too apt to be those who, through 
fatal lack of natural or acquired gifts, can but 
grope in mental blindness along earth's ocean 
beaches, under its Italian skies, or among its 
Alps and Apennines, its Yosemites and Yellow- 
stone Parks, and Colorado Canons. Yet Nature 
has not been left without worthy witnesses and 
interpreters ; her landscapes and sea-scenes and 
sky-glories have been transferred to the printed 
page or the painted canvas, and the human mind 
has been endowed with marvelous conceptual 
power, — a power to picture to itself what has 
been described by another, so that our literatures 
and galleries of art become magic windows 
through which the whole world is brought into 
view, and not only the world of today, but of yes- 
terday, yes, of yester-age. The past pageantries 



146 MAN'S TOMORROW 

and peoples of earth brighten and breathe in our 
very presence. Thus, for our enjoyment, not 
only from all lands, but from all the centuries 
are the curtains lifted. 

And so, too, the wondrous sights that have been 
unveiled to scientists we make our own. We can 
see in our mental sky, through the object glass 
of Imagination's great refractor, Saturn with her 
attendant moons, her luminous rings, and her 
rainbow-dyed mantle of woven light. We can see 
through Imagination's microscope the perfect 
mechanical contrivances, the intricate yet nicely 
adjusted parts, the regal decorations of those 
marvelously minute atoms of animate matter so 
full of astounding evidences of a divine handi- 
work. 

We have even greater revealing power granted 
us, adding still further to our refined and perma- 
nent pleasure. We have visions of what eyes of 
flesh, however aided by artificial lenses, have never 
seen and never will. We can by this grand fac- 
ulty of fancy, when furnished with the conclu- 
sions of comparative anatomy and cognate sci- 
ences, witness earth as it passes through its geo- 
logic eons of fire, and cosmic storm, and earth- 
quake shock, and grinding glacier; we can watch 
the rise and fall of the ancient dynasties of vege- 
table and animal life; we can see the taming of 
Nature's elemental forces, the purifying of its 
atmospheric currents, the establishing of its 
great outline of continent and river-basin and 



MAN'S TOMORROW 147 

mountain-chain and ocean-bed, the preparation of 
its soils, its quarries of rock, mines of metal and 
beds of coal, and the softening and beautifying 
of its land and water-scenery under the molding 
hand of Jehovah, that earth may at the last be- 
come man's fit dwelling place. 

We are more privileged still. From centuries 
yet to be the curtains have by inspired prophecy 
been partially drawn aside under the promptings 
of an infinite kindness, in order that while on their 
way through this vale of tears "the young men 
may see visions and the old men may dream 
dreams." 

Noble as are the intellectual pleasures that thus 
come from the uncurtaining of Nature's phenom- 
ena and of her systems of law, profound as is the 
enthusiasm of experimenters in science and all 
searchers after truth, nobler pleasures and pro- 
founder enthusiasm animate those who enter Na- 
ture's vast arcanum, not simply inquiringly, but 
in a deeply reverent mood, who recognize in their 
discoveries revelations of a divine plan, ushering 
them with distinguished privilege into the felt 
presence of a personal God; who regard phe- 
nomena as the crystallized thoughts of some great 
organizing mind, and study with ever-increasing 
interest the displays of a Creator's exhaustless 
resources of invention, the manifestations of his 
power, and the unfolding through the ages of that 
grand ideal of his which in its final embodiment 
must bear the marks of his own infinitude and per- 
fection. 



148 MAN'S TOMORROW 

Even such exalted pleasures and enthusiasm as 
come through the opening of this mental com- 
merce between earth and sky, between man and 
God, are still further enhanced so soon as men 
discern that these thoughts expressed in phe- 
nomena are not the idle play of a self-amusing in- 
tellect, but the outpourings of a beneficent heart. 
But the most satisfying pleasure and most exalted 
enthusiasm are reserved for those who, embold- 
ened through the longings of their loneliness for 
closer, tenderer ties, draw aside with a humble, 
chastened confidence, the veil whose folds fall be- 
fore the Holy of Holies in the great temple of 
Nature and see above the mercy seat, not the 
broken outlines of a cloud made luminous by the 
awful presence of Jehovah, but the clear, speak- 
ing face and the outstretched, welcoming arms of 
their own loving Father. 

Profoundly as we enjoy thus uncurtaining for 
ourselves what is without, we as profoundly enjoy 
uncurtaining to others what is within. In health 
we follow the promptings of deeply-seated social 
instincts. Sympathy is our vital air. He who is 
anchorite from choice gives evidence of serious 
mental lesion. A very large share of our waking 
hours and busy thoughts are devoted to self-reve- 
lation. We take the greatest delight in discover- 
ing to others who we are, our tastes, aptitudes, 
accomplishments, opinions, trials and triumphs, 
longings and cherished ideals. We have given to 
us many avenues of communication. Articulate 



MAN'S TOMORROW 149 

speech, intonations of voice, postures, gestures, 
and gait, blushing and blanched cheeks, sunny 
and flashing eyes, smiling and curled lips, open 
and knit brows — these are some of the upliftings 
from our souls of their fleshy curtains. We also 
make ourselves known in our personal attire, style 
of our house, grounds, and equipage, in our 
choice of business or profession, in our methods 
of work, and in our intimate companionships. 
The pleasures thus derived brighten and bless 
every human life. But although we are thus so 
richly endowed with self-revealing power, and 
have found in its exercise such varied delight as 
is witnessed by the world's social gatherings, ex- 
tensive libraries, art galleries, and architecture, 
vocal and organ harmonies, impassioned oratory, 
military and commercial triumphs, and ingenious 
utilizations of matter and force through all its 
countless industries, yet with these many ways of 
lifting the curtain from the soul there has never 
yet lived a person, how fortunate so-ever in op- 
portunity or gift of utterance either in words or 
works, but has felt deep disappointment at the in- 
completeness of the revelation. 

With most of us there are serious hindrances 
to a personal unveiling to be met with in our sur- 
roundings and in the imperfections of the flesh in 
which we are incased. How few are masters of 
their circumstances, are freed from the corroding 
drudgery, the dwarfing routine of the toil neces- 
sary to secure subsistence, of toil sadly unsuited 



150 MAN'S TOMORROW 

either to tastes or aptitude! How many gifted 
souls have been deprived of that peculiar concur- 
rence of circumstances needed to call out and em- 
ploy their peculiar powers ! Some geniuses, like 
Cromwell, or Grant, or Toussaint L'Ouverture, 
who was a slave till fifty, are seolian harps of such 
massive strings that they remain mute of music 
until swept by some tempest blast of war, while 
others are so delicately, ethereally built that they 
answer in melody of rarest sweetness to the fairy 
touch of summer zephyrs, but are shattered so 
soon as the wind be risen but a little. Upon how 
many rests also the incubus of disease or of a be- 
wildering fancy ! How many are hampered by 
loss or impairment of bodily organs and inborn 
defects of temperament, and by pernicious early 
training! How many have their individuality 
obscured by limitations of race, caste, climate, 
widely prevailing religious or social errors, or 
by the heavy iron hand of tyrrany! We pass 
through this life, and finally pass out of it 
nobly longing for recognition, yet profoundly 
conscious that not only from the general pub- 
lic but even from bosom friends much of our 
real selves is yet concealed, that our essential per- 
sonality still lies in shadow. This marked in- 
completeness in this, the crowning work of God's 
creation, is in such contrast with the infinite per- 
fection which the trained eyes of scientists have 
found everywhere alike in the mineral, vegetable 
and animal kingdoms below us, that it stands in 



MAN'S TOMORROW 151 

my mind as Nature's sure word of prophecy that 
there has been prepared for us another, larger life 
beyond. This wide plan of concealment is, as I 
have endeavored to show, most admirably fitted 
for a probation period, for the preliminary devel- 
oping first years of our existence; but if death 
ends all, then this plan is a terrible failure, a 
cruel mockery, a discord where we should look 
for an outburst of the grandest harmony. 

Not only does our sense of the eternal fitness of 
things thus suggest a life to come, but there are, 
as I have already suggested, strong intimations 
in Nature and Revelation affording us glimpses 
of what that life will be. Prominent among its 
characteristics must be that of a grand uncurtain- 
ing. Here recur to us again the words of pro- 
phecy: "The city," that resplendent celestial city 
John saw in the far-away land of the soul, "had 
no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine 
in it, for the glory of God did lighten it. . . The 
gates of it shall not be shut at all by day, for 
there shall be no night there." Its inhabitants 
"shall see God's face, and his name shall be in 
their foreheads. . . . The Lord God giveth them 
light, and they shall reign for ever and ever." 

St. Paul says: "Now we see through a glass 
darkly; but then face to face: Now I know in 
part; but then shall I know even as also I am 
known." All that is gross and imperfect and per- 
ishable, all that is opaque, that lacks transmit- 
ting power, will be purged away. 



152 MAN'S TOMORROW 

Once in a while, even in this world, a strange 
white light has been seen to shine out on the hu- 
man countenance, a sort of saintly radiance. 
Joseph Cook in his lectures has called special at- 
tention to this. Some of us have perhaps wit- 
nessed it. It probably betokens a signal victory 
in some great spiritual crisis. The glory of the 
soul seems so to fill the temple that it blazes out 
through its curtained windows. It may have been 
this that so lit the face of Moses when he came 
down the side of Sinai, and of Stephen as his life 
went out in that storm of blind frenzy, which, 
through Saul, had burst on the heads of the Chris- 
tians, and of Christ himself as he walked on the 
sea or stood on the mount at midnight glistening 
with transfiguring light. The thought suggests 
itself again, as it did when we were considering 
another phase of this question, that even now a 
spiritual body lies concealed within the natural, 
and that this is what we see during these times of 
crisis. A like double commission seems, as re- 
marked before, to be intrusted to all insect life. 
This change of bodies we call metamorphosis, and 
the departure extends not only to the structure of 
the parts, but to the character of the instincts as 
well, and often to the nature of the habitat. A 
similar plan is noticeable even throughout the 
vegetable kingdom. One is especially struck with 
it as he watches the opening of the petals of a 
night-blooming cereus. For months and years 
a specimen of this species of cactus will pass a 



MAN'S TOMORROW 153 

very ordinary, monotonous existence until, at 
some mysterious command, some talismanic touch, 
a minute bud will start out on the edge of one of 
its long, leathery leaves ; that bud will lengthen 
into a tendril, and on the end of that tendril will 
unfold during the hours of a single evening one 
of the most elaborately wrought floral products 
in all Nature. So with us, two germinal impulses 
may, for aught we know, have been inclosed in 
one envelope. 

We have occasional intimations of having in re- 
serve means of spiritual commerce which our pres- 
ent surroundings prevent our using. There are 
many authentic instances on record, a few of 
which I have given on preceding pages, of minds 
interchanging thought, though sitting in mute 
meditation, and sometimes, though divided by the 
breadth of a continent. Over what wires these 
telegrams of souls are flashed none know; that 
they are actually sent, even cautious men of sci- 
ence concede. Under certain conditions, mysteri- 
ous as yet, the curtains of the flesh are lifted. We 
also have had the long-forgotten past brought 
suddenly into view. Persons who have been at 
the point of drowning relate experiences of this 
sort, the multitudinous scenes of a lifetime start- 
ing up simultaneously out of their graves as at 
the trumpet call of some angel of the resurrection. 
And then, too, what wonders have we seen 
wrought under the laws of suggestion ! We are in 
enchanted chambers where words falling care- 



154 MAN'S TOMORROW 

lessly from the lips touch springs to hidden doors, 
smiles playing about the face light up frescoed 
walls, and simplest sounds are echoed into touch- 
ing harmonies. 

There is surely a great day coming when all 
hearts will stand revealed. To some it will be a 
day of shame and contempt, to others a day of 
glad deliverance, of long-looked-for recognition. 
Are any of you under the shadow of a great sor- 
row? Has the curtain of death hidden from sight 
the face of a loved one? Are any worried and 
weighed down by heavy loads of care, by the 
friction of uncongenial toil? Do any feel ham- 
pered by untoward circumstances? Is the white 
light of your souls dulled or discolored by its im- 
perfect transmission through these thick walls of 
clay? Have any been wronged by misconception, 
isolated, walled out from the appreciative sym- 
pathy of those whose esteem you crave? Wait. 
Wait with Christian confidence and constancy 
and content, with hearts kept warm with Chris- 
tian love, with hands kept busy with Christian 
work ; wait that great, glad day when from before 
each soul's inmost life of emotion and motive all 
hiding curtains will be rolled away. 

I have taken pains, as you have no doubt ob- 
served, to base my predictions as to the nature 
of the life beyond on the seemingly safe assump- 
tions that God in completing his ideal will con- 
tinue to follow along those two main lines of evo- 
lution which have thus far marked the ongoings 



MAN'S TOMORROW 155 

of his providence — namely, the uncurtaining and 
the unfettering of all spirits which bear his image 
and will consent to come under the molding power 
of his love. These two phases of evolution, science, 
— science not only of physics but of metaphysics 
as well as of personal and national history, — has 
unmistakably brought to light, and in the facts 
and underlying laws and principles established by 
it, it has afforded us not dim intimations merely, 
but clear and certain signs of prophecy as to 
what man in his threefold nature is destined to be- 
come. I have already attempted to point out what 
will be the final outcome of the processes of un- 
curtaining. I now ask you to consider the results 
of unfettering. This last purpose in providence 
is as definitely marked as the first, is as full of 
privilege, of promise, and of power. As these 
lines of evolution frequently and intimately inter- 
lace, it is sometimes difficult to keep them sepa- 
rate in our thoughts. As I have in discussing the 
question "Was Christ Divine?" attempted to 
show Christ's place in Nature and the indispens- 
ableness of his influence to the healthful growth 
of the soul, and dwelt with considerable fulness on 
the true nature and source of liberty, I will con- 
tent myself here with simply outlining what I 
there elaborate into argument and analysis. 

The only way to set Nature's forces free is, as 
we have seen, to fulfill certain fixed conditions, 
for they are all placed under inexorable laws 
from which they have neither power nor disposi- 



156 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tion to free themselves, and we have no power to 
free them. They work under divine commissions 
to divine ends. To free a force, then, is not to 
release it from law but from what prevents it from 
acting in strictest obedience to it. The same holds 
true not alone in the inorganic kingdom, but in 
the organic, where life-forces master and mold 
those mysterious atoms we call matter. Chemical 
combinations, for instance, follow undeviating 
mathematical formulae, and the germ-forces of 
both vegetable and animal life work their won- 
ders only when provided with a precisely fitting 
and predetermined environment. 

The promptings of instinct are also as 
methodic, as much under Divine control, as reflec- 
tive of Divine thought, as peremptory in their de- 
mands for prompt and full obedience. To break 
away from them is not to come into larger liberty, 
but to tighten the chains and ultimately to destroy 
the life of the organism which they were designed 
at the first to build up and maintain. 

We find, too, in mental activities as rigid 
regularity as that prevailing among chemic, crys- 
talline, or vital forces, thoughts being generated 
as methodically under laws of association and 
suggestion as thunder-bolts are forged and hurled 
from the sky, salt atoms crystallized, or bodies of 
the birds formed within the walls of eggs, our will 
power being effective only in holding and direct- 
ing the attention. Even the highest form of force 
— the spiritual — manifested in affections, aspira- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 157 

tions, purposes, and far-reaching hopes, we find 
are at the first but germinal and lie dormant until 
there is a compliance with certain fixed conditions, 
when their fetters fall and they begin under the 
laws of spiritual assimilation through the quick- 
ening influence of sunbeams of sympathy to grow 
into the permanent moral traits of the soul. 

There have also been established regular grada- 
tions of force throughout Nature's realms, rank 
rising above rank in a determinate series, and so 
we discover that a force if it would keep free after 
having once been set free must both obtain abso- 
lute mastery over all the forces below it and yield 
implicit obedience to all above. This is the uni- 
versal law of Divine harmony. Its infringement 
in the life of the body, the organizing vital force 
losing its grasp over the mechanic and chemic, re- 
sults in debilitating diseases, marred symmetries 
of form and graces of motion, maimings, dulled 
senses and sensibilities, and at last the full tyr- 
rany of death; in the life of the intellect, the will 
failing to direct and hold the attention, in way- 
ward fancies, disordered reasonings, idle, inco- 
herent day-dreaming, or relentless monomania; in 
the life of the soul, the angels of better impulse 
and aspiration succumbing to the devils of base 
and selfish desire, in all those countless spiritual 
disasters and despotisms which have so darkened 
human history and at times even threatened to 
ingulf utterly the very hopes of the human race. 

As the soul at birth is necessarily characterless, 



158 MAN'S TOMORROW 

possessing simply innocency, and, through its 
gifts of freedom of choice and moral discernment, 
possessing a capacity for virtue, and as virtue 
can be the outcome only of growth through pro- 
tracted struggle with temptation and victory over 
it, God, in order to develop in man his own moral 
image, was compelled to place him in an environ- 
ment of disciplinary influences, to house him in 
just such a body and in just such a world as we 
find, to bring him into such close and constant re- 
lation with the forces about him that he must 
become ultimately either their master or slave. 
The danger was imminent, but indispensable. Of 
course, until the work of character-building is 
finally finished, discipline will be needed, and this 
contest will continue. But when this work is done, 
the soul purified and perfected, there will ensue 
a complete change of environment. The spirit 
will doubtless still be linked with matter, will have 
a body, but a body so vitalized that it will no 
longer wall it in with prison dampness and 
shadow, but will be to it round about as a lordly 
pleasure-house, a palatial home, a body freed 
from weakness and all forms of disease, from dis- 
tortions and impediments and present limitations 
of use, a body with multiplied powers, with en- 
larged outlook, having all grossness, all infelici- 
ties, all vestiges of incompleteness, forever purged 
away. It will cease not only to curtain the soul, 
but to imprison it. 

There is no reason for believing that the human 



MAN'S TOMORROW 159 

spirit will ever cease its intellectual activities or 
attain unto a completeness of knowledge or of 
thought-power. Its mental horizon will doubtless 
ever widen as the years go by; its comprehension 
of God's thought as it is embodied in his works, 
and will fall from his lips, will become ever deeper 
and more true. But he will be freed from the 
trammels of this but half-living flesh, from the 
trammels of indifference and inattention, of super- 
stitious fear and prejudice and pride of opinion 
and selfish ambition that so handicap his every 
eifort now. 

The question meets us here, When will this 
complete unfettering come? I would answer, not 
until the spirit has, through the discipline of suf- 
fering and struggle, attained permanently the 
attitude of full consecration and devout trust. 
Not until then will we, or can we, enter that far- 
away heaven of our longings and our hopes, 
where all care-burdens are lifted and sorrows 
cease, where, uncurtained and fetter-free, we for- 
ever take loving counsel together and walk with 
God. Heaven is not simply a place into which 
souls are ushered straightway after death, but a 
far-off, final stage of spiritual evolution into 
which we may gradually grow, after a long and 
desperate struggle, if we will. God can gift us 
with moral discernment, crown us with sov- 
ereignty, provide schools of discipline, throw 
around us the arms of his infinite love, proffer us 
his sustaining grace, urge and aid us by his provi- 



160 MAN'S TOMORROW 

dences, his written Word, and the incomparable 
life of his Son, but there necessarily end alike his 
responsibility and his power, for the evolution of 
character, the determining of ultimate spiritual 
destiny, can be the fruit only of the untrammeled 
choices of the soul. Heaven is simply that bliss 
of peace which Christ left as his last legacy of 
love, a peace battle-born and battle-tested, into 
the inheritance of which no spirit can enter until, 
after being fully tried, its last fetter falls, its per- 
manent state becoming that of full consecration 
and devout trust. We little appreciate what 
marked changes we must still undergo to reach 
this spiritual development or realize that only 
thus we can secure that largest liberty under law 
which is the purposed consummation of that vast 
scheme of evolution inaugurated and thus far for- 
warded by Divine love as revealed first in Chris- 
tianity's Record, and now, with added emphasis, 
in the widest generalization yet reached in scien- 
tific thought. 

There has been, as I have already remarked, a 
constant progress through the centuries from the 
simple to the complex, from a uniform sameness 
of material atoms to a radical diversity of spir- 
itual gifts. A self-conscious, absolutely distinct 
personality, possessed of both intellectual and 
moral discernment, is the very crown of God's cre- 
ation. So evidently is this the final end aimed at 
in this law of evolution, the most advanced scien- 
tists and philosophers are coming to recognize 



MAN'S TOMORROW 161 

the fact that to the forming of each separate soul 
God has given his direct personal attention, that 
a distinct ideal of his is wrapped up in each spir- 
itual germ, an absolutely unique combination of 
boundless possible powers, and that it is to the 
healthful unfolding of these very embryo possi- 
bilities of personality he has directed all the re- 
sources of an infinite love. For the securing of 
this unfolding there must be present eventually 
an environment of the very largest healthful lib- 
erty. The political and religious persecutions 
that have so darkened and disgraced human his- 
tory show how sadly mistaken hitherto have been 
the world's conceptions of Divine purposes, and 
how utterly futile any attempt to stay the on- 
goings of this mighty tide of Divine progress. 
Mankind have at last, after unutterable sorrow, 
been led to see how true this is, so that to-day 
there is throughout Christendom a fuller, freer 
growth of individuality than ever before in both 
church and state, and liberty is now so far ad- 
vanced that we need no longer have any fear that 
government, ecclesiastical or political, "of the 
people, for the people, and by the people," will 
ever "perish from the earth." 

The belief is rapidly gaining ground that Di- 
vine inspiration in our individual lives should be 
looked for chiefly along the lines of our individual 
tastes and aptitudes, and that our special gifts 
are indices of our divine commissions, tokens of 
God's particular personal attention to each one of 



162 MAN'S TOMORROW 

us, revelations of his will, and prophecies of our 
to-morrow. We may for purposes of discipline 
be hemmed in by hindrances now, but they will 
pass, and we need simply to wait, not in despond- 
ency or in idleness, but in consecration and with 
a patient trust. We are having an ever-widening 
outlook. Eternity is now being projected into 
clearer view, is clothed with greater certitude, and 
we can live more completely in its light and under 
its power than ever before. We should look for- 
ward with unshaken confidence to ultimate and 
permanent victory, being content to abide God's 
time, and feeling assured God's time will come. 
Christ in his human nature had to let go every 
earthly prospect, taste in anticipation the bitter- 
ness of desertion, consent to surrender himself 
into the hands of murderous hate, and pass 
through the deepest valley of humiliation before 
attaining to that deep peace which he chose for 
his disciples in that hour of tender parting as 
the richest legacy of his love. Indeed, in no other 
way, in the very nature of the case, is this peace 
possible, for it comes, and can come only, from 
most perfect spiritual liberty, and this is always 
proportionate to the degree of consecration and 
of trust. Not until we can say in Love's full self- 
surrender, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
in him," are we free from the bondage of fear or 
care or discontent, of pride or envy, of passion or 
prejudice, or any of the thousand and one en- 
slavements whose galling fetters it has so often 



MAN'S TOMORROW 163 

felt. This state of the soul, instead of dampen- 
ing its ardors or lessening its activities, will fos- 
ter them continually; its selfhood, being thus hal- 
lowed, not hampered, will ever act out healthily 
and heartily to noble ends and to assured success. 
Love as an incentive has never known an equal, 
and never will. The higher and purer it is the 
greater will be its impelling power. If now and 
then the soul's plans fail, it feels confident that 
other and better ones will take their place, ap- 
parent present defeats being regarded as pre- 
cursors of coming victories. Its plans formed 
while in this state broaden out into eternity. Its 
individuality enters upon a freer, sounder devel- 
opment, for it is now looked at as a part, and a 
very essential part, of the Divine guiding, and 
its cultivation a sacred duty. This complete un- 
fettering, the second great end aimed at in evolu- 
tion, is clearly within the reach of every human 
soul. Christ's life and legacy prove this. His 
life shows that it was certainly within his own 
reach. This all concede, — infidel as well as be- 
liever. If he was simply a man, then a mere man 
has reached it. If God as well as man, then in 
the words of his bequest we have the promise of 
the power ; for surely he would not in cruel mock- 
ery leave to his disciples in that most solemn 
hour, full of the tender est farewells, as the last 
token of his love, that which he knew they had no 
capacity to incorporate into their own lives and 
character. But happily we are not shut up to a 



164 MAN'S TOMORROW 

course of reasoning to convince ourselves of this, 
but may see its transcendent truth gloriously in- 
carnated in those transfigured lives which have 
so brightened and blessed the centuries since his 
advent. I might fill my pages with their recital, 
for there never has been an age in which God was 
left without a witness. 

"What are these which are arrayed in white 
robes . . . These are they which came out of 
great tribulation and have washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb. There- 
fore are they before the throne of God and he 
shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst, neither shall the sun light 
on them . . . For the Lamb shall feed them and 
lead them unto living fountains of water and God 
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." 

It will be noted that only a carefully selected 
company are here referred to by the mystic seer 
of the Apocalypse. This is what on careful re- 
flection we would expect, for the vast mass of 
mankind will in this life have passed through but 
the preliminary stages of character-building, and 
a long, severe course of discipline will still await 
them. As I have formerly remarked, all that God 
has power to bestow upon any human soul are 
possibilities or capacities for moral growth, and 
an indispensable disciplinary environment. The 
evolutionary process must still go on, extending 
through hundreds, perhaps thousands of years 
for some, depending upon the rate of progress, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 165 

the advantages appreciated and utilized; but in 
which one of the countless circling worlds of 
God's universe this probationary period will be 
spent is not disclosed, the disciplinary environ- 
ment, however, must necessarily remain essen- 
tially the same, the gates of the Celestial City 
will not be passed, the hiding curtain fully lifted 
or the final fetter fall until the spirit has been 
perfected through suffering and peril and de- 
ferred hope and sorely tried self-abnegation, and 
has thus attained unto a state of complete, loving 
self-surrender and confiding trust. When how- 
ever, the process of spiritual evolution will have 
ended at last, as it must end sometime, when the 
robes of the souls have been made white, cleansed 
from every stain, then the predictions bodied 
forth in this rapt vision will for all such ransomed 
ones have come true. They, too, as here typified 
will enter in through the gates, will stand before 
the Throne in the privileged, veritable, visible 
presence of Jehovah and he "will dwell among 
them," the long-fought battle will have ended, an 
eternal peace, a rapturous, radiant joy begun. 
Under these glowing poetic symbols, taken in view 
of recorded facts in human history we are en- 
couraged to anticipate, as I interpret it, that 
some startling changes are to take place in that 
far away home of the soul, that all finally re- 
deemed spirits will experience not only surcease 
of sorrow, but intimate intercourse of thought 
with God himself, involving a never-ending intel- 



166 MAN'S TOMORROW 

lectual delight, an ever-unfolding faculty and in- 
sight, the privilege of actually looking into our 
Heavenly Father's very face, feeling the kindly 
kindling light of his eyes, hearing the winning 
tones of his voice and being thrilled by the articu- 
late utterances that will actually fall from his lips, 
all further necessity for concealment having 
ceased. 

Many will doubtless condemn this view as a too 
literal, a wholly unwarranted interpretation of 
an oriental, poetic extravaganza. Let us see. 

In the first place, this is not the long discarded 
ancient pagan conception of deity and destiny, 
for the gods of mythology were represented as 
being prompted by the same low ambitions, petty 
jealousies, ungoverned appetites and passions that 
debased human souls and ate like a cancer into 
the heart of human society. It is rather that 
view which permeates the whole Bible revelation, 
exalting our ideal, presenting us with pictures of 
a majestic personal Being measurably within the 
grasp of our finite conceptions possessing match- 
less purity, the tenderest of fatherly sympathy, 
infinite wisdom, sovereign power. The concep- 
tion is anthropomorphic in this regard, that it 
presents God as having a personality like our own 
only enlarged, and purified and perfected, 
affirming that we have been created in his image, 
that we have been gifted with the same attributes, 
that as the years and eons go by we shall, under 
the resistless, never-ceasing processes of evolution, 



MAN'S TOMORROW 167 

of spiritual assimilation, grow more and more into 
his likeness, attain unto an ever closer, more lov- 
ing relationship with himself. When we attempt 
to go farther than this, to affirm of God a nature 
wholly unlike our own, unconditioned, as is the 
tendency today in our philosophies, and some so- 
called systems of science, and even schools of the- 
ology, we at once get into a hopeless confusion of 
thought, a jugglery of words, trying to depict a 
being absolutely inconceivable, about whom no 
longing human heart can cling, whom no aspiring 
human soul can worship, simply because no hu- 
man intellect can conceive. If God is without 
form, simply an immensity-filling force, he is as 
far removed from our ken as he is from the worm 
that crawls at our feet. The doctrine of Divine 
immanence so prevalent in our Churches, and, in- 
deed, so widely entertained outside of them, is 
open to this most serious charge, of dissolving 
God into a nebulous abstraction. Christ came in 
order to incorporate into our thought a thinkable 
Heavenly Father. We only know or can know 
so much of God as can be expressed in terms of 
humanity. 

As Professor Elmer Gates is perhaps its most 
eminent and able advocate, a very brief epitome 
of his system of thought will best bring out its 
salient points, and the fatal confusion into which 
it inevitably leads. Scores of foremost writers 
and educators of our times bear enthusiastic wit- 
ness to his superior intellectual gifts and 



168 MAN'S TOMORROW 

achievements. In his brochure on the subject of 
immortality, incorporated in R. J. Thompson's 
symposium, we find him advancing the theory that 
One Mind is immanent in all substance, a begin- 
ningless and endless Being, whose dwelling place 
is infinite space, who embodies all power, and in 
whom we literally live and move and have our 
being. He argues that a Something, the eternal 
Mystery of the Universe, has always filled space, 
that if space had ever been empty it would be 
empty now, otherwise something could come out 
of nothing; that this uncaused, uncreated, Some- 
thing must have been self-conscious mind, other- 
wise for the same reason no self-conscious mind 
could now exist; that this mind is therefore im- 
manent in the Cosmos, coeternal with it and omni- 
present in it; that it is impossible for conscious- 
ness to exist save in a state of perpetual change, 
for a uniform sensation quickly becomes unno- 
ticeable, the pressure must perpetually change or 
the sensation will cease, consequently the Supreme 
Mind which is embodied in the infinite universe, as 
our minds are in our bodies, must constantly un- 
dergo changes which in order to be fully conscious 
must take place perpetually in every part; that 
living things are physiologic and psychologic or- 
gans within this omnipresent organism and all 
worlds and all intelligences are functioning parts, 
hence ever new worlds and new minds as new un- 
foldings must continually take place; that every 
living thing gives off electric waves that flash 



MAN'S TOMORROW 169 

through space with the speed of light; that sen- 
sory images are telepathically transmitted from 
brain to brain; that all organisms mutually act 
and react and are as closely linked as are our 
bodily organs by nerve fibres, all forming one 
mental, cosmical, never-ending process, the whole 
differentiating forever into millions of mind-em- 
bodiments ; that, so far as we know, a living thing 
cannot exist apart from or independent of a ma- 
terial embodiment; that the universe, mind being 
immanent in every part of it, is a Living Total- 
ity; that human consciousness is a part of the 
Supreme Mind, immanently embodied in this uni- 
verse, and man being a psychologic organ in this 
Omnicosm it is impossible for him to cease to 
exist, for God to be conscious throughout his 
whole being must be conscious of every part in it, 
and the very act of being conscious would be an 
act of re-creating, of eternal perpetuation; that 
for us to die would be for the uncreated God him- 
self in part to cease to exist. 

Thus with incisive analysis the Professor has 
attempted the solution of some of the most baf- 
fling mysteries that have ever confronted the 
human intellect. His elaborate system of psychol- 
ogy will doubtless receive marked attention by 
scholars the world over. The doctrine of Divine 
Immanence which it embodies is already, as I have 
said, a widely prevalent belief. The doctrine of 
Divine Transcendence, extra-cosmic, is necessarily 
wholly precluded. This extreme view is to me un- 



170 MAN'S TOMORROW 

distinguishable from the pantheism of the old 
Greek philosophers. 

Pope bodied forth this same thought in his 
famous couplet in his Essay on Man, 

All are but parts of one stupendous whole 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul/' 

and Professor Haeckel, Darwin's distinguished 
German disciple, affirms it with even greater em- 
phasis, asserting that "souls are but the sum of 
plasma movements in the gangleon cells, and God 
nothing more than the infinite sum of all natural, 
all atomic forces, all ether vibrations." 

The mystery of the Divine Presence being con- 
sidered by the great majority as too deep and too 
sacred for human fathoming, and the whole sub- 
ject being in consequence hastily dismissed not 
only by such new cults as Christian Science and 
New Thought, as well as by the recently revived 
Oriental Theosophy, but even by conservative 
Christian beliefs, and dangerously ill-defined pseu- 
do-pantheistic ideas of the Divine nature being 
suffered thus to creep in, portraying God as an 
infinitely distributed and all-embodying life-force 
or principle, or it may be an unconditioned per- 
sonality, apart from which absolutely nothing 
exists as a separate entity, no independent, self- 
conscious, responsible human soul, God being, as 
it is phrased "all and in all," modern thought thus 
helplessly and rapidly drifting afield it is cer- 
tainly worth our while to enter upon a patient re- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 171 

examination of this most profound problem of 
Divine personality and Divine presence. 

Of course we cannot hope with our finite pow- 
ers to grasp the infinite, but if we would have 
God become to us a definite personality, a being 
whom we can love and to whom we can pray, we 
must form for ourselves a conception of him 
having somewhat at least a definite and appreci- 
able outline, however inadequate that outline may 
actually be to the Great Original. If we are led 
to regard God simply as an immensity-filling 
force, as an unknowable and unthinkable intelli- 
gence, we have absolutely nothing left us to which 
love or faith or hope can cling. So imperatively 
necessary to any spiritual life in those of reflec- 
tive habits are clear notions on this subject, every 
efforts should be made to dissipate as far as pos- 
sible the many mist banks that have settled upon 
this portion of the world's mental landscape. 

The question naturally arises, in what sense is 
God everywhere present? Is He distributed like 
an atmosphere, permeating every substance 
through and through, equally present and present 
in the same sense in every corner of his do- 
minions at the same instant and continuously? 
Does he fill all space, reaching out on every side 
infinitely, having no limit, no form, no separate 
abiding-place, no existence apart from the uni- 
verse he has made, but indiscriminately and in- 
separably commingled with it, so that all matter 
and force are nothing more than phases of the 



172 MAN'S TOMORROW 

Divine presence, everything being God, and God 
everything? 

Can we believe in God's omnipresence and still 
avoid this mental fog-land? It will be impossible 
for us to free the subject entirely of difficulties, 
for the nature of our own personal presence is 
still, to a considerable extent, shrouded in mys- 
tery. Of the essential nature of the forces we 
know nothing. They are not only wholly impal- 
pable to us, but wholly inconceivable. We are, 
however, led to believe that the physical and vital 
forces are entities in themselves, dwelling in mat- 
ter and presiding over it but not constituting any 
part of it. Whether they have dimensions, and if 
so whether those dimensions are coextensive with 
the forms of the matter they inhabit, are subjects 
about which it is idle to conjecture. We only 
know of their presence by their effects on matter, 
and so we have been compelled to accept the con- 
clusion that their presence is coextensive with 
their influence. The organic forces which have 
built up our bodies and are now lodged within 
them are supposed to be present in those bodies 
wherever their vitalizing influence is felt and no 
further. Our spirits, — which, if we can credit the 
testimony of self-consciousness, are forces sepa- 
rate from the organic and superior to them, yet 
lodged within the same tenements — are understood 
to extend their personal presence through the or- 
ganisms just so far and just so long as they ex- 
ercise direct personal control. The opinion that 



MAN'S TOMORROW 173 

the soul is seated somewhere in the brain generally 
prevails simply because that organ is the scene of 
the soul's greatest and most constant activity, the 
place where its influence is fullest felt. Personal 
presence, if closely analyzed, will be found to be 
made up of three distinctive elements, — knowl- 
edge, sympathy and will. 

The soul can reach out farther than the con- 
fines of the body in all these three directions, and 
the circle of this outreaching may be properly 
regarded as the circle of its personal presence. 
We thus come into each other's presence when we 
approach near enough to be able to uncurtain our 
innerselves through the eye and ear and lip and 
lifted hand, when our faces shine out in frank 
avowal and our voices are intoned with the 
thought and feeling our hearts teach the tongue 
to express. The more numerous and the more 
widely opened the avenues of communication be- 
come, the more pronounced and immediate become 
the personal presence. We have given us other 
avenues than the bodily senses. There is a subtle 
and secret spiritual influence that exhales from 
every soul, an unconscious, self-revealing power, 
and power of making one's presence felt. What 
the radius of that influence is, or its nature, none 
know. The fact of its real existence, however, 
has long since ceased to be a matter of doubt. 

This unconscious spiritual influence is supple- 
mented by a conscious, deliberative out-reaching 
of the soul's sympathy and by direct acts of voli- 



174 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tion. So far away, then, as our souls can uncur- 
tain themselves to others, and can make their 
power of sympathy and of will felt by direct spir- 
itual impressment, so far sweeps the circle of our 
personal presence. Now, if our bodily senses 
were such that we could see each other and hear 
each other speak across a continent or around a 
world as readily as we now do across a room, and 
our unconscious and conscious spiritual influence 
and our sympathetic and volitional power could 
extend so far, we might properly assert that our 
personal presence was equally transcontinental 
or world-embracing. Right here, it seems to me, 
we have suggested an explanation of God's omni- 
presence which is wholly relieved from that vague- 
ness which so tends to weaken Christian faith, 
and presents for our thought and worship a Being 
with as sharply defined a personality as our own, 
possessing precisely analagous characteristics 
simply magnified and perfected. Even had it not 
been revealed to us that we are created in God's 
image, we would be warranted by the principles 
of sound philosophy in basing our conceptions of 
him upon those we entertain of ourselves, to think 
of him as one the counterpart of whose attributes 
may be found in our own. If he has any other 
we cannot know it or have any basis upon which 
to form the least conception of it. 

Suppose, then, God to be a spirit as distinctly 
different and apart from his universe as are our 
spirits from these garments of flesh that now en- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 175 

wrap them; suppose that he can see every object 
and watch every phenomenon in every part of 
his wide domain as readily and as perfectly as 
we can the things and the happenings in any 
single room in which we may chance to be, His 
organs of vision being not only telescopic but mi- 
croscopic, and possessed, moreover, of what we 
understood by clairvoyance, a power to see 
through the densest substances, so that the most 
distant, the most minute, and the most opaque lie 
within easy and perfect visual grasp ; suppose his 
means of acquaintance with such other qualities 
of his material universe as are revealed to us in 
part through our different organs of sense are 
also equally comprehensive and exact ; suppose 
he is so perfectly conversant with the nature of 
all the delegated forces, and the conditions that 
unfetter them, that he can release or enchain 
them at his pleasure; suppose that his will can 
operate as directly and as effectively everywhere 
over both dead matter and living force as our 
wills do to the utmost confines of these encasing 
bodies of ours, his will working in precisely the 
same way, only with a wider sweep and a more 
commanding power; suppose he is placed so en- 
rapport with every thinking being that he not 
only knows what is passing in the most secret 
self-communings of every mind, but can oppor- 
tunely introduce his own thought through tele- 
pathic channels and leave it to the laws of associ- 
ation and suggestion to work its transformations ; 



176 MAN'S TOMORROW 

suppose he can entertain at the same instant an 
unlimited number of ideas without experiencing 
any more embarrassment or even as much as we 
when we entertain the few possible to our capac- 
ity, so that he can take ready cognizance of 
everything occurring, and divide his attention 
among as many changes as there are changes mo- 
mentarily effected throughout habitable space; 
suppose, in other words, all the secrets of the uni- 
verse lie open before him, and all the forces are 
made servitors directly and indirectly of his sov- 
ereign will, — then we may affirm of him not only 
omnipotence and omniscience, but also omnipres- 
ence as a natural and necessary result of these 
two, and yet predicate of him no means of knowl- 
edge or resource of power or phase of personal 
presence we ourselves do not possess in a limited, 
finite form, he differing from us in not a single 
attribute but simply in the perfectness and in the 
unlimited comprehensiveness of every one. 

This viewing of God as a spirit in whose image 
we ourselves were fashioned at the first and whose 
wish and purpose it is that under laws and 
processes of evolution established by himself these 
implanted germs of Divine likeness shall unfold 
through the ages into more perfect and pro- 
nounced resemblance; this regarding of his per- 
sonal presence as, in every essential, resembling 
our own, and differing only in sweeping through 
a wider circuit because based on a wider knowl- 
edge, a deeper sympathy, and a more imperial 



MAN'S TOMORROW 177 

will, while in no way belittling our conception of 
him, clears it happily of much of that pseudo- 
pantheistic mistiness and impersonality that make 
him seem to us so unreal and so almost hopelessly 
remote. Highly gratifying and sustaining it cer- 
tainly will be to be able to thoroughly convince 
ourselves of God's continual and active presence 
in this world of ours and wherever hereafter, in 
the life beyond, our lot may be cast, and to bring 
within our finite comprehension how he can thus 
be present and present everywhere and during 
every moment and yet possess as distinct a per- 
sonality as our own. 

We must see that we need not be affrighted from 
the hope that in that far-off time when our char- 
acters will have become finally perfected and fixed 
through suffering and struggle, when it will have 
become safe for God to unveil his face, he will, 
as prophesied in St. John's Vision "dwell among 
us," in visible, companionable presence. If it is 
not in this new specific sense he is to be present, 
but simply as he has always been, certainly no 
mention would have been made of it as a supreme 
reward to this ransomed white-robed company 
which had come up out of great tribulation. 

Tennyson in some inspired moment bequeathed 
in that poem which has long since taken rank as 
an English classic, this self-same concept as a 
last legacy to a longing, sorrow-burdened world, 
stating in the closing stanza: 



178 MAN'S TOMORROW 

For tho' from out our bourne of time and place 
The floods may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crossed the bar.'' 

Throughout Christ's whole teaching, through 
his tender love of the Father, through his con- 
fident promise to his disciples, we find the same 
delineation of the Divine presence. For him to 
have made any other affirmation would have de- 
feated the purpose of his mission, as it would 
have hopelessly shut out God from human thought 
and from human love. The interpretation of the 
nature of personality which I have here presented, 
while it brings God within the compass of our 
finite conception, at the same time makes no denial 
of his essential omnipresence, but the rather re- 
affirms it with added emphasis. 

It now remains for us to discover, if we can, by 
following the trend of God's past providence, 
completing the periphery of the circle of His 
thought from the section left us as a base, the 
next, and, as far as we can conceive, the final stage 
in the soul's destiny. 

Its moral warfare ended, the evolution of char- 
acter having become t omplete, to what can it look 
forward in the ongoing of the still eternal years 
with anything like satisfactory anticipation? Is 
it destined to a surfeiting monotony of joy, to a 
dull routine of existence? Significant intimations 
have been given out from time to time of what 
have been kept in reserve against this day, and 



MAN'S TOMORROW 179 

no apprehension of any such fate need alarm us. 

It will be noted in the first place that the over- 
shadowing purpose in this life is unquestionably 
to conserve ethical and spiritual interests. The 
intellect has been handicapped in countless ways 
to further moral ends, yet despite all hindering 
physical weaknesses and necessitous burden-bear- 
ing, despite death's frustration of many cherished 
plans, its achievements have been astounding, as 
witness the wisdom stored in the world's great 
libraries, the discovery of the many hidden laws 
that govern nature's forces, the unearthing and 
utilizing of its vast treasure-houses of raw mate- 
rial, the penetrating with its telescopes into the 
farthest star-peopled spaces, and with its micro- 
scopes into the almost infinitely minute, thus ex- 
tending the horizon of its vision well out into the 
uttermost bounds of the universe, the measuring 
and weighing of suns, and with its spectroscopes 
determining their elemental ingredients, the do- 
minion of its overmastering might until all the 
swarming multitudes of earth and air and sea are 
subject to its sway, the making of the body's ar- 
ticulate utterances, through its telephones, heard 
across the broadest continents, the speeding of its 
thoughts with the swiftness of thunderbolts 
through the wireless air and with its telegraph 
lines encircling the globe, harnessing steam, 
electric and chemic forces to its vast machineries, 
to its ships and trains of trade. In the exercise 
and further development of our inherent intellec- 



180 MAN'S TOMORROW 

tual possibilities we shall be forever increasingly 
amazed at the inexhaustible richness of God's 
gifts. We shall find ourselves capable of entering 
into ever closer communion with the Divine Mind, 
of acquiring profounder insight into the vast 
plans of the universe, and aiding still further in 
their unfolding. We shall no doubt always be 
connected with God's physical worlds and engaged 
in revealing and rendering serviceable their hid- 
den resources, as well as our own, of power and 
of privilege. What we have thus far done is but 
an earnest of what it is possible for us still to do. 
We have already in our indefatigable researches 
in science and our multitudinous inventions in the 
arts for utilizing nature's forces actually, though 
unconsciously, re-thought the thoughts of God, 
thus evincing our mental likeness and sonship. 
We have even become sub-creators, completing 
many of God's purposely unfinished designs in 
both the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The 
universe is still replete with ideas of his that are 
waiting to be wrought out through our co-opera- 
tion as the ages go by one by one. Right here 
broad theatres for mental activity are awaiting 
us, priceless opportunities for entering into an 
ever-deepening intimacy with the Divine life. 

The royal richness of these mental gifts are 
especially evidenced in the astounding achieve- 
ments of genius in almost every department of 
thought and action, — achievements so transcen- 
dent and so mysteriously wrought the world is 



MAN'S TOMORROW 181 

still baffled in its attempts to explain their secret. 

We have also been afforded glimpses of vast 
mental resources kept as yet in reserve, such as 
that strange psychic force of the sub-conscious 
self, subject to the call of suggestion, the marvel- 
ous gift of telepathy, by which the most secret 
whisperings of souls can be heard across the 
breadth of continents, the revealing hypnotic 
trance, the clairvoyant sight, the kinetic sway 
over matter, and other occult powers whose actual 
possession by man science at last reluctantly con- 
cedes, though the laws controlling them are still 
but very imperfectly understood. 

The vast multitudes that people this planet go 
out of life with their mental development barely 
begun, and even those most cultured are at the 
very last painfully conscious of imperfection and 
immaturity, with impulses for growth still insist- 
ent within them, while boundless oceans of truth 
stretch away before them all unexplored. How 
eagerly will the quest be again resumed, how tire- 
less and inspiring the study and utilization of the 
infinitely varied works of nature, and especially 
when with clarified minds they are granted, be- 
sides, that higher privilege of direct communion 
with the very mind of the Master. 

The perfecting of human souls is unquestion- 
ably the consummation of God's plan on this 
planet, and upon the healthful, unique individuali- 
zation of each one all his care has been centered. 
The question of how or when these souls came 



182 MAN'S TOMORROW 

into existence is seemingly an insoluble mystery. 
The old notion that matter and mind were created 
out of nothing has long since been discarded, it 
being one of the prime axioms of science that 
something cannot come out of nothing. And so 
the alternative is presented us of considering them 
either as without beginning or else as subsequent 
emanations from God himself. Yet how can either 
supposition be sustained? If without beginning, 
having already passed through an eternity of evo- 
lution, how is it possible that minds are still im- 
mature, why have they not reached perfection 
untold ages ago? Why do they not have some 
remembrance ante-dating their birth into the 
present life? 

On the other hand, if our souls are, as we are 
led to believe, each a veritable entity, with a pro- 
nounced personality of its own, with independent, 
responsible, will power, capable of entering into 
open, persistent rebellion against the Divine will, 
and if, as our intuitions tell us, these our self- 
conscious egos are, also, each an invisible unit, 
how is it that the Divine ego, which is supposed 
to be like our own, can be susceptible of sub-di- 
vision and the separated part can cease to be 
Divine, can become human and finite and after- 
ward become debased? 

C. L. Arnold, in his recent volume, entitled 
"Cosmos, the Soul and God," in attempting to 
solve this perplexed problem of our origin, boldly 
assumes that there has existed from all eternity 



MAN'S TOMORROW 183 

an impersonal yet intelligent, prolific, ever active 
psychical universe, back of which and outside of 
which stands a personal God directing it when 
and how he chooses, that his purposes never fail, 
and that the product of his infinite energy is 
marked by no imperfection, but that the inferior 
forms of psychical energy, the ill-developed crea- 
tures of every species of vegetable and animal life 
that perish before maturity are not of his cre- 
ating, that his activity appears only in that 
larger plan of ultimate purpose, that he is not 
responsible for the fungus and the parasite, the 
claw, the talon and the fang, the heartless, univer- 
sal preying of creatures upon each other, the dev- 
astating war of the elements, the dangerous pit- 
falls set to entrap on every hand, that these are 
but the accompaniments of that world-wide, world- 
deep, energizing that from all eternity has been 
progressing under the immutable law of evolution. 
It is true that this author, in this his monistic in- 
terpretation of the facts and findings of science, 
avoids on the one hand the quasi-pantheistic con- 
ception of Divine Immanence, and on the other the 
necessity of holding God accountable for the uni- 
versal antagonism, the agonies and losses that 
accompany the coming and going of life on this 
planet, but in order to escape from this dilemma 
he is obliged, as we have pointed out, to suppose 
the existence of an intelligent, yet impersonal self- 
existent power pervading all physical and psychi- 
cal processes throughout the cosmos, utterly 



184 MAN'S TOMORROW 

apart from God, yet subject to his will and used 
by him as an instrument in the working out of 
his beneficences through the ages. How there 
can be an intelligent power without personality 
and without responsibility, and how out of such 
impersonality personality could ultimately come, 
he leaves wholly unexplained, though it manifestly 
contradicts another well-known axiom of science, 
that nothing can be evolved that has not first been 
involved. As this his theory cuts off the vast ma- 
jority of the human race from all hope of an after 
life, they being but the abortive attempts of this 
irresponsible, impersonal cosmic force, fit only to 
be swept into the scrap heap of the universe, it is 
of altogether too dismal a nature for us to accept 
without more positive proof, although he has 
spent twenty-five years, as he tells us, in its elabo- 
ration. 

Dr. William B. Brown, D.D., Pastor Emeritus 
of the First Congregational Church of Newark, 
N. J., in a quite recent volume remarks, "The old 
idea was that when God created the universe he 
made it out of nothing; but this is naturally 
impossible and inconceivable. From nothing, 
nothing comes. Just what the stuff was that God 
put into the universe and then breathed into it 
the spirit of life we do not certainly know, but it 
must have been a pre-existent something; and 
what is more reasonable than to suppose that it 
was something of God's pre-existent self that he 
wrought into nature and breathed into that some- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 185 

thing the living spirit of law, light and progress. 
This does not mean self-creation, nor is it making 
God and nature identical, which would be panthe- 
ism. To put something of himself into the uni- 
verse and its operations would deduct nothing 
from God's infinity or personality, for what is 
infinite cannot be made finite. Nor would it 
diminish his personal freedom in establishing 
such laws and operations as should in the end se- 
cure 'the highest good of being.' Till a better 
theory is found I accept this as the probable 
theory of creation. If it be not true, then, either 
the universe must have been created out of 
nothing, which is inconceivable, or else if matter 
existed independent of God, then how is God un- 
conditioned and absolute." 

Greater contradiction and confusion of thought 
than that embodied in this short paragraph I have 
never anywhere met with in all my reading, yet 
it is the deliberate production of a learned Doctor 
of Divinity. I will not take time to analyze the 
inconsistencies, as they are altogether too ap- 
parent to require pointing out. However, the 
statements quoted should not be regarded as proof 
that in general the author lacked lucidity or sanity 
of thought, they simply show the limitations of 
the human mind, the utter impossibility on the 
part of any of us to unravel the mystery of the 
origin or of the essential nature of matter and 
mind, and should serve as a warning to the rest 
of us against elaborating any theory, or attempt- 



186 MAN'S TOMORROW 

ing to shed any light, or even professing to have 
any clear and satisfying opinion regarding them. 
The doctor is partially conscious of the hopeless 
entanglement of ideas into which he has fallen. 
His fault lay in trying to entertain and express 
an opinion on a subject hopelessly beyond human 
grasp. 

Dr. A. H. Strong, President of the Rochester 
Theological Seminary, in his work on "Christ in 
Creation and Ethical Monism," has also essayed 
to solve this riddle of origins, together with those 
other two with which it is inseparably joined, the 
nature of the Trinity, and the existence of evil, 
and with his distinguished coadjutors, to whom I 
have referred, has also succeeded in simply dark- 
ening counsel without knowledge, as the following 
excerpts will show: "How can there be any finite 
personality, or freedom, or responsibility, if all 
persons as well as all things are forms or modifi- 
cations of the Divine? I venture to suggest this 
answer. Christ is of the substance of God, yet he 
possesses a distinct personality. If in the one 
substance of God there are three infinite person- 
alities, why may there not be in that same sub- 
stance multitudinous finite personalities? How 
can that which is of the substance of God ever 
become morally evil? While man never could 
break the natural bond, he could break the spirit- 
ual and introduce even into the life of God a prin- 
ciple of discord and evil." . . . "The Father 
by himself is the divine nature latent, unex- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 187 

pressed, unrevealed." . . . "In the eternal 
Christ, the Word, is God's truth, love and holi- 
ness as made objective and revealed to himself." 

"Since Christ is the principle of revela- 
tion in God, we may say that God never thought, 
said, or did anything except through Christ." 

"In Christ the divine and the human are 
indissolubly united." Without any attempted 
analysis, these quotations serve as strong cumula- 
tive proofs of the incongruities, the utter impossi- 
bilities of thought into which the most trained 
intellects are inevitably betrayed the moment they 
attempt to unravel these three great riddles of all 
time. How apropos the rejoinder of the woman 
of Samaria in her talk with Christ, "Sir, thou hast 
nothing to draw with and the well is deep." In 
view of these conspicuously unsuccessful attempts 
on the part of three learned, certainly earnest, yet 
perplexed thinkers, would it not be far better for 
us not to try to unravel the mystery of our origin, 
acknowledging, in the words of John Fiske, in his 
monograph on "The Destiny of Man," that 
"Whence came the soul we know no more than 
whence came the universe, that the primal origin 
of consciousness is hidden in the depths of a 
bygone eternity, that it cannot possibly be the 
product of any concurring arrangement of mate- 
rial particles is demonstrated beyond all perad- 
venture by what we know of the correlation of 
physical forces ; that while we know nothing of the 
primal origin of the soul we have learned some- 



188 MAN'S TOMORROW 

thing with regard to the conditions under which 
it has become incarnated in material forms"; ac- 
knowledging this, will it not be better to rest con- 
tent with the assurance of the fact, a fact of in- 
finite prophetic significance, that we are now, 
somehow, in some way, veritable living beings, 
with an eternal future before us, full of richest 
promise; that we can, if we choose, become puri- 
fied and perfected through Christ's redemptive, 
transforming love, become joint heirs with him, 
and with him enter into direct, intimate compan- 
ionship with the ever unfolding thought-life of 
God. 

We have an implicit belief that altruistic love 
will finally prevail, that the eternal years of God 
are hers, that unsympathetic, selfish greed will be 
overthrown, that the consciousness of acting nobly 
is worth every sacrifice of wordly ease, or posses- 
sion or prospect. What is it that we thus prize 
higher than life with all its alluring possibilities 
if not something that outweighs them all in worth 
and therefore must outlast them all. We acquire 
greatest consciousness of safety, of stability, of 
permanent triumph by coming into consciousness 
of having at the very core of our nature the inde- 
structible principle of loving fidelity. We believe 
that love is immortal, and if we are allied with 
that, if that is the mainspring of our being, 
nothing can destroy us. We would not willingly 
sacrifice everything earthly for love if such belief 
were not the very ground work, the deepest sub- 



MAN'S TOMORROW 189 

stratum of all our spiritual being. This loyalty 
to love is counted by us of infinite value, and we 
are convinced that if our souls are possessed with 
it we are as eternal as God himself, that even 
he could not destroy us, for he himself is the 
supreme embodiment of love, and love cannot de- 
stroy love. The very fact that it is possible for 
us to become like him in nature makes it possible 
for us to become equally everlasting. It is for 
us to determine whether we will. Such height has 
been reached by some. It may be reached by all. 
This very attitude of the soul is eternal life. 
When the soul comes into it what is now called 
death is but transition, an incident, a change in 
an eternal life already begun. He that loses his 
life for love's sake the same shall save it. He 
becomes one of the immortals from that very hour. 
The grave has no victory, — death no sting. The 
soul has triumphed and has been crowned with 
the amaranth of immortality. Could God have 
anticipated and purposed the annihilation at the 
last of the whole human race when he thus en- 
dowed souls with these limitless capacities and 
possibilities for virtue? Yet he knew, as we have 
already remarked, that this whole world-pageant, 
as shown by science is finally to cease, that physi- 
cal life throughout the universe is eventually to 
become extinct. The divineness of a life of love, 
it is this which Christ revealed. This is that su- 
preme proof which he gave of immortality. 

Love, — that which glorified his life and to en- 



190 MAN'S TOMORROW 

kindle which was the one all-absorbing purpose of 
his mission, — pure, perennial, perfecting love, in 
its casting out of fear uncurtains the soul, in its 
surrender of self sets the soul free. Its universal 
reign is that "far-off divine event to which the 
whole creation moves." It alone can open the 
gates of the New Jerusalem, can thrill the soul 
with the quickening power of an endless life. 



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